Invest in Art - Preserve the Story
By Sara Connell Sanders
Podcaster, Educator and Writer
Photo by Jonnie Coutu, Pow! Wow! Worcester Mural by Kristin Farr
A month or so after we moved into the old caretaker’s cottage, we found mold in our basement. A lot of mold. My husband insisted on removing it himself on the hottest day in August. It was difficult to take him seriously in his gas mask and yellow rain slicker, but by god he had a way with a crowbar.
We were both surprised when he began to uncover wall-to-wall murals concealed beneath layers of plastic paneling and drywall. Each concrete facade revealed a new chapter in the adventures of a handsome Springer Spaniel. I imagined the dog’s name was “Sport” or “Champ” — something regal. We had no idea how long ago the mural had been painted or by whom. The design was primitive, but it had been our intention all along to invest in artwork for our new home, and here we had our first piece.
The nuns in the main house next door were able to provide a little bit of information. Their estate once belonged to Lyman Gordon, one half of the esteemed Worcester manufacturer Wyman-Gordon. Our other neighbors’ lots had been duly occupied by Gordon’s gardener, butler, and barn animals, respectively. The caretaker kept bees, or so they say.
My husband and I took the task of decorating our new home quite seriously. We fell in love with a John Pagano painting on a tour of the artist’s warehouse studio and styled our whole living room in complement. I asked Pagano if it would be safe to hang above the fireplace and he told me, “Life is short — hang it wherever you’ll enjoy it.” On Fridays after work, we’d play records and drink wine, trying to decipher Pagano’s strokes, which reminded me of film perforations and reminded my husband of a triceratops.
I moved often growing up. For this reason, the prospect of outfitting a permanent adult interior without being booted felt like a novel concept. My husband and I owned a lot of muralist’s prints as a result of the POW! WOW! street art festival where, incidentally, we had our first date. None of the pieces melded naturally with our 1910 cottage. I resolved to make them work.
My office became the proper resting place for our archival pigment print from Brazilian muralist Arlin Graff. I remembered meeting Graff by chance in 2016 at two in the morning as I left my restaurant job downtown. We were crossing the parking lot and there he was, in the darkness, fifty feet up in the air with a spray can in his hand. The framed print reminded me of new love and over-proofed rum.
“These posters used to be such a thing,” according to my friend Lindsay, a talented Worcester native who runs Pocket Studio Creative. She told me while she packed up her boxes to skip town. The poster had gained popularity in magazines like Elle and Domino in the mid-aughts, coming to represent endless love or the degradation of women’s speech patterns, depending on who you asked. She charged me next to nothing for the art, a dozen dessert plates, a mid-century vanity, and a calf skin rug. “I’m just glad it’s all going to a good Worcester home,” she said.
I bought a ream of peel and stick wallpaper for an accent wall to tie everything together. Swimmers in Speedos and bathing caps floated up to the ceiling, bewitching anyone who happened on the otherside of my Zoom calls. My mother-in-law gifted me an old abstract painting to match. My husband remembered the canvas from his youth, but had only recently deciphered the figure of a woman hidden in its negative space. The soft silhouette elevated my office, lacing the details of a historic room together through time.
Next, I added a Super Rural poster to my office, inherited from graphic designer, Lindsay Pope. Lindsay did some design work for the podcast I co-host, Pop It Worcester, in order to bring our disco-feminist aesthetic to life. The pink and red poster read, “FOR LIKE EVER.” It was a hand-me-down.
Photo credit & artwork: Photo by Jake Sanders, Art (clockwise): Poster, Lindsay Pope; Hearts, Eamon Gillen; Bird, Arlin Graff; WORC, Tim Convery of Timscapes, Provincetown & Retro Painting by unknown artist
The final piece I plan to have framed for my office is a green duct tape design by Tim Convery, a Worcester native I met in Provincetown. A couple of summers ago, we sat on the backsteps of his shop on Commercial Street and he told me about the stolen travel posters that first inspired his style.
“North High had been closed and I went in there with a friend of mine,” explained Convery. “We were walking around and we found the old foreign language rooms. There were all these amazing 60s posters of Spain and France.” Mid-retrieval, the cops showed up and he was promptly arrested. I bought one of the “Timscapes” — a recognizable silhouette of Bancroft Tower, and propped it up on my desk as a reminder that great risk brings great reward.
My husband wants to board up the basement mural and preserve it for an unsuspecting homeowner to discover fifty years from now. I say we let the Spaniel run free. Either way, it stands to remind us that every work of art has tales to tell, and there’s no better investment than a good story for a cocktail party. Wouldn’t you agree?
Sarah Connell Sanders is a Worcester based writer, teacher, and podcaster at Pop It!
Her work focuses on women, local culture, and education.
