10 artists create murals for empty downtown storefront windows

By BILL CHAISSON
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CLAREMONT — As festival goers walked toward the live music booming out of the Claremont Brewfest on Saturday, they passed several artists were at work on the suspension bridge. Each of them faced a sheet of plywood, long axis oriented either vertically or horizontally, and under the brilliant sunshine they were applying a design to the surface.

The event was organized by Ernesto and Phil Montenegro, father and son artists, who also contributed paintings for the occasion. Their work was up in the Claremont Makerspace, across Main Street from the Santagate Bridge, but six of the artists elected to do their painting in public. It was an event that took some planning.

The elder Montenegro approached city officials last April and his original idea was to put a set of murals near the Visitor Center Common on the north side of the Sugar River. There is an old foundation near the river with suitable walls. But the city decided that the area was too unstable and did not want to encourage people to visit it to see the murals.

Montenegro then hit upon the idea of placing paintings in the windows of empty downtown storefronts, something that has already been done in Springfield, Vermont. “We needed to access and permission from the buildings’ owners to do that,” he said. Mark Brislin, director of the parks and recreation department, suggested that the painting be done on the suspension bridge.

As it happens, an artist dropped out just before the event and Montenegro needed to round up another one to keep his commitment to provide 10 paintings for 10 storefronts. A friend of his wife’s suggested he contact Jamie Townshend of Springfield, who happened to be the artist responsible for all the murals in the storefronts there. “I called him up and I wasn’t even finished asking him,” said Montenegro, “and he said yes. This was on Thursday and the event was Saturday, so that was pretty impressive.”

Townshend was unable to be present on Saturday, so he drove up the the Claremont Makerspace on Friday and painted his contribution that day: two trout nose to nose in bright expressionist colors.

All of the other artists were former students or colleagues of the Montenegros, from their days at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester.

Ashleigh Carpenter met Montenegro through the committee for Claremont’ s 250th anniversary that led to Montenegro’s monumental sculpture being erected at the north end of the Santagate Bridge. Her painting resembled the queen of hearts playing card. She is traditionally depicted holding a rose in her left hand, but Carpenter has her left hand plunging a sword through her head and her right hand cradling Venus’s mirror, the traditional symbol for the female gender. It is a surprisingly subtle commentary on a zeitgeist that includes the #metoo movement.

Carpenter had been teaching art at the New England Classical Academy, but she recently made the transition to working at Bar Harbor Savings and Trust.

Lyell Castonguay and Cavand Burnet have a nonprofit called bigink.org based in Newmarket. They travel from city to city doing public demonstrations of large-scale block printing. Their design, like all their work, is in black and white. At the tips of an outstretched hand are a key, a quill, an ink bottle, and a rolled parchment, and in the palm, a flaming albacore tuna. Their pet name for the portable printing press is “the tuna” — “because it’s big and its rare,” said Burnet.

Foad Afshar is a retired mental health consultant from Manchester and an old friend of the Montenegros. He insisted that he was “just a dabbler” in painting and was at work on a Persian rug design that perhaps the brightest work on the bridge.

Afshar, who formerly worked at the institute of art, said the Manchester arts community is thriving and growing, in part due to the influx of tech companies. Their employees, he said, tend to be younger and they expect there to be cultural activity in the city’s downtown. “It’s a great synergy,” he said.

Lisa Scanlon, a former student of Montenegro’s at the art institute, is now an art therapy mentor at a mental health facility in Montpelier, Vermont. Her painting depicted a bull moose in mid bellow, standing in coniferous landscape that she was coloring to more closely resemble the aurora borealis than an actual forest.

Dana Coco’s first foray into art was as a tattoo artist. Then he went to college at the New Hampshire Institute of Art and now he is a freelance illustrator. His painting was of a cardinal perched in the rib cage of a skeleton. It began life as a tattoo; he inked a smaller version of it on the inside of a friend’s arm a year ago.

“I’m a big horror fan and I love Halloween,” he said. “There is a tradition that whenever you see a cardinal it is the spirit of a dead loved one wandering.”Many passers-by had remarked to him that the cardinal was the Stevens High School mascot, which was news to him. “Nobody has noticed that it is sitting where the heart would be.”

Marcus and Eileen Greene were working a painting of two spheres that was based on one of Marcus’ designs. “He often uses spheres in his work,” Eileen said. “These represent night and day.” Most of the artists were using ordinary latex house paint for their work. The Greenes were mixing in a bit of studio-grade acrylic. Marcus focused on the night and Eileen on the day.

Montenegro was quite pleased with how the event had turned out. He gave a lot of credit to City Manager Ryan McNutt, Director of Economic Development Nancy Merrill, Director of Parks and Recreation Mark Brislin, and Mayor Charlene Lovett for helping to move it forward.

It was a beautiful day, which enabled the artists to work outside, and the crowds headed to the brewfest provided a steady flow of viewers. “If this is a success,” said the organizer, “I’d like to do it again next year.”