Street Art – Worcester’s Got It!

(Please click on the photos to make them bigger.)

Today’s Worcester Telegram and Gazette shouted in a front page spread that 40,000 art lovers flocked to StART on the Street yesterday to view and buy the art and crafts of about 250 local artists.

Maybe 40,000 is a wee exaggeration, but seeing the event, which took up several blocks of Park Avenue, filled me with pride in Worcester. I realized that there is a burgeoning community of talented artists in these parts, some of whom came from outlying communities to sell their creations. I am constantly amazed at the power of the creative urge (especially in older folks, like my fellow crones) that inspires people to spend their weekends and spare hours creating art out of an incredible variety of materials.


Yesterday I saw artists working with media ranging from painting, sewing, knitting, glass blowing, mosaic, iron welding, and furniture building, to feathers, gourds, dolls --even forks. (Matthew Bartik, whose business is aptly named “Fork Art” was so busy selling sculptures he has created by bending forks that you had to wait in line to get up to his table to pay him.)


A new wrinkle in this year’s StART on the Street was having artists demonstrate their craft. For instance there were three blacksmiths—one of them a woman-- another woman spinning yarn on a spinning wheel, and a huge “community quilt” of designs chalked on the street surface by anyone who wanted to create a square.


There were scads of small children (and small dogs in odd costumes). It was interesting to see the children transfixed as they interacted with a knight in shining armor, fencers fencing, craftsmen demonstrating how to carve and saw wood, even a lady covered in bronze paint and sitting on a ladder looking as still as a statue—these real-live artists were more interesting to the youngsters then anything they might see on television because they could hold the knight’s sword or saw on a log with the wood cutter, collect the wood chips and draw on the pavement with chalk. They were being entertained by the dancers and musicians and the man with the shell game and they were learning something about arts and crafts at the same time.


I saw a lot of paintings and prints and photographs I liked, and bought a few cards of Worcester photos from Dick Taylor. I also bought a little brown fabric doll with dreadlocks who is sitting in a rocking chair holding a miniature teacup. For gifts I purchased a couple pieces of “fork art” and a lacey wooden bowl crafted by Al Wheeler from solid oak using a scroll saw.


The food and drink booths had block-long lines and kept running out. All the artists I spoke to were thrilled with the business they were doing. It was a perfect day—not too cold and mostly not too hot. As I left StART on the Street, I walked through Elm Park, the oldest piece of land in the United States set aside for a public park in 1854. It has been full of outdoor art for two months, including a “fountain” made of empty plastic bottles gushing from a tree into the lake. (This year I noticed a lot of art is being made from recycled plastics—everyone’s thinking “green.”)


On the way to my car I took a photo of my favorite three-deckers—Worcester’s trademark architectural form, originally designed to house the families of the immigrant factory workers who crowded the streets at the turn of the last century, when Worcester was a thriving industrial center.


Today the city is much less crowded and many of the public buildings are empty, but on a day like yesterday, it was clear that, when it comes to encouraging arts and crafts, Worcester is worthy of its (usually) ironic nickname, “The Paris of the Eighties.”

My Favorite Painting by an Unknown Artist

I fell in love with this oil painting the minute I saw it hanging on the wall of a couple of friends in Cambridge. This (above) is a snapshot I took with my camera, that I keep pinned to the wall near my computer. The flash washed it out a little, but you can see it pretty well.

My friend Caroline found this painting some years ago hanging in a crowded antique shop in Vermont. She asked about it and managed to buy it for a reasonable sum. (She didn’t say how much.)

Turns out this is not really the work of an unknown artist—the painting is named “Last Respects” and dated 1984 and is signed by Eugene A. Fern, who was, according to his obituary, “a writer and illustrator of children’s books.” But as far as I can tell, he’s not a listed artist nor did he ever acquire fame or fortune from his paintings. He is best known for his children’s book “Pepito’s Way.”

Here’s his New York Times obituary in its entirety, dated Sept. 11, 1987.

“Eugene A. Fern, a writer and illustrator of children’s books, died Sunday, apparently of a heart attack, at his home in East Hardwick, Vt. He was 67 years old.

“A professor of art at New York City Community College, now New York City Technical College, for 29 years, Mr. Fern retired to Vermont in 1975.

“Over many years, he wrote and illustrated a number of children’s books, including “Pepito’s Story,” “What’s He Been Up To Now?” and “The King Who Was Too Busy.”

He is survived by his wife, Claire; a son, Arnold, of Manhattan; a daughter, Marcia Boston of Cambridge, Mass., and a granddaughter.”

As I said, I fell in love with the painting at first sight and I didn’t need to know anything about the artist, because it was all there on the canvas. In my mind this was clearly a painted autobiography of a man who had been a fair-haired little boy, a dark-haired teen, a soldier, a groom in a tuxedo, who grew a beard and lost his hair in his later years.

The ghosts of his former selves, transparent and each wearing a golden halo, are clustered around an open coffin that allows us a small glimpse of a white-bearded corpse of a man—the only full-color flesh-and-blood person in the painting of eight individuals.

But the ghosts of the old man’s departed selves are not looking at the corpse; they’re looking at us, the viewer. Perhaps their intense regard is meant to tell us what often was written on tombstones: “As I am now so will you be.”

I find this painting moving and brilliantly composed and painted.

I know that this will cause truly hip and knowledgeable art experts to curl their lip in scorn, because I am aware that realistic and figurative art is not “in” at the moment. Reading reviews of a recent Venice Biennale, I got the feeling that there was not a single painting in it, abstract or not. From what I read, everything seemed to be a video tape or a light show or an assemblage or an installation or a pile of found objects on the floor.

But I’m pretty old-fashioned, and when I went back to painting at the age of 60, I started with flowers and landscapes and stuff, painting en plein air in the hot sun of Greece, but pretty soon I discovered that a painting that has no human figure or face in it tends to bore me. So now I concentrate pretty much on genre, portraits, and figure drawing. All very out of style, but I keep watching and hoping for a return to representational art.

I like to share from time to time my favorite paintings by other artists and I particularly wanted to share this one, because I feel it must have been Fern’s masterpiece and his memoir. He painted it in 1984 when he was sixty-four and he died three years later. He died young, but he evidently saw his death coming and it inspired him to painting this “Last Respects” as a summary of his life and a warning to us.