‘A whole different place’

Posted 9/11/14

There’s no teacher, no recognized director and no requirements to be a member of the group … except an enjoyment of one another and painting.

That’s obvious when you step into the crafts …

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‘A whole different place’

Posted

There’s no teacher, no recognized director and no requirements to be a member of the group … except an enjoyment of one another and painting.

That’s obvious when you step into the crafts room at the Pilgrim Senior Center on Thursday afternoons.

The room is quiet, although Bill Strand brings along his radio-CD player and, when in the mood, they listen to music.

The air has a whiff of turpentine and purpose. Mike Brophy is bent over a large rectangular canvas balanced between his lap and the table. A tapestry of fields fills the foreground, stretching to distant mountains rising from the valley fog. The sky is steel gray, white and blue. It is a painting of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. Mike is repainting the sky, making it lighter.

The picture is not entirely his creation. He found it and is painting over the original work. He holds it up and asks Alice Goldstein what she thinks.

She sits beside him, working on a smaller canvas on a table easel. The painting is nearly complete and is recognizable to those who remember Rocky Beach. The foreground is filled with waves of yellow and green bushes and grasses and, on the rising hill, a blue-gray cottage. There are more cottages in front of a green backdrop of trees.

Alice studies Mike’s work.

“It could use some pink.”

Mike is startled. He evidently hadn’t expected that. But Alice’s observation is well taken. Isn’t the sun setting and wouldn’t the sky still reflect those rays?

He looks at the sky, and then the palette in front of him. He goes back to mixing paints.

“I just walked in one day,” Mike said, when asked what prompted him to take up oil painting, “and I keep on coming back.”

Maureen Agnew offers how she became a Thursday regular.

She said she had two hobbies earlier in life – sewing and painting. At one point, several years ago, she decided she would go back to painting and bought brushes and paint. They sat untouched until she came to the senior center for a flu shot. She saw the group and decided that was the moment.

“It’s like riding a bike,” she said, of the ease at which she returned to putting paint on canvas.

Maureen felt she was senior in rank before retiring as an English teacher from Pilgrim High.

“Here I don’t feel one of the oldest,” she said.

On the other hand, Bill still works part-time at the New England Institute of Technology Bookstore, a job he took on after 28 years with the United Airlines ticket counter.

Bill was painting a scene of downtown Providence. He used a photograph he had taken for inspiration. But he says what gives him great pleasure is painting the homes of friends. The friends apparently have no idea of what he is doing and are totally surprised by his unsolicited gifts.

For Alice, painting is an escape.

“It takes my head in a completely different place,” she says.

She started painting at 9 years old and then dropped it before returning 56 years later. The paints and brushes she uses are ones she still has from her college days.

What does she like about it?

“They never come out how you think they’re going to come out.”

Ronald Girouard looks the artist, with his mustache and beret. He’s held in esteem by his peers for his skill and fast work.

But Ron misses a lot of that because he is hard of hearing.

He looks up from a still life he is working on. He smiles.

“Make it fun. That’s how you get good pictures.”

Other regulars on Thursday include Norma DesRoches, Elaine Prior, Lee Foley, Phyllis Curtis, John DeSisto and Rue Krecioch.

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