COOS BAY — The project got off to a slow a start.

Leader Bittin Duggan was adapting an art therapy process she developed for people who had experienced traumatic brain injuries to an entirely different population.

The participants, students at Destinations Academy, the Coos Bay School District’s alternative high school serving at-risk youth, were as welcoming of a new teacher’s ideas as one might expect.

Yet somehow, these unlikely artists came together to create something they could all be proud of — “Imagination Behind the System,” a three-dimensional painting that will be on display during February’s ArtWalk! at Black Market Gourmet on Feb. 14.

For now, it hangs where it was created — in Room 330 at Harding Learning Center.

“It looks a lot better than I thought it would,” said James Bennie, surveying the 4-by-8-foot artwork made by him and 10 other students at Harding during the fall trimester.

Bennie, a junior who joined the class halfway through the term, said he was surprised to discover how much he liked doing art in the class.

“Everyone told me how cool it was,” Bennie said. “All of my friends were in it. So I came down to art, and I found out I really enjoyed it.”

According to sophomore Matt Ward, who was in the class from the beginning, the halfway point was when it started to get good, moving from talking about ideas to actually making something.

“I had doubts at the beginning,” Ward said, when there was “a lot of writing. I’m not really down with writing.”

Duggan, a Coos Bay artist who led another “Growing Through It” workshop at the SHAMA House last winter, acknowledged the difficulty of getting the students involved in the project.

“The usual process didn’t fit into their reality,” she said. “It took a few sessions to get through that these are teenagers; brainstorming isn’t going to happen.”

Though 11 students were part of the class at some point, Duggan said it began and ended with about six students — but not the same ones. A core group of six students in place at the halfway point finished the project, she said.

It was during the construction of the piece’s wooden frame that inspiration struck, the artists agreed. When a series of crossbars put in place across the back of the frame to make the piece stable didn’t work out for their intended purpose, things turned around — literally.

“All of the dividers, those were meant to be on the back,” said Sheen Davis, a senior and the only girl in the class. “We thought they would be kinda cool on the front.”

Davis explained that the dividers came to represent the school system and the boxes the students felt they were placed in. By painting over the dividers, the students were able to allow their imaginations to escape the system.

“There’s a lot of separation, cliques,” Bennie said. “People isolate themselves. The schools implement that on them, herding people around. We’re trying to break through that.”

Dividing the painting into six or seven boxes also allowed the students to create their own individual spaces within it, Duggan said. The colors and styles vary widely among the sections.

“It’s very diverse, as we are,” said Davis, claiming responsibility for the piece’s gloomiest corner, a panel done in purple that features a graveyard.

A book made from drawings done in the project’s early stages includes one showing a similar scene, along with messages about where bad life choices can lead.

Working on the opposite corner, Bennie said he tried to paint his feelings from day to day in a colorful, abstract section. Another section includes a representation of the Northern Lights.

Davis also pointed out seven mushrooms featured in various parts of the painting.

“All of us here are kind of like mushrooms,” she said. “We grow where not many others dare to grow.”

For Duggan, who has conducted the workshop 57 times, individualizing something that has always been a group process yielded interesting results.

“It’s probably the most different piece that’s ever been done (in Growing Through It),” Duggan said.

The project, which was funded in part by the  Coos County Cultural Coalition, also left her with a new perspective on the students.

“These kids have a determination, a clarity that’s really admirable,” she said. “They’re going to succeed, even though they’re going to Harding.”