The artwork around the stage at Harpswell Community School incorporates local birds and evergreen trees, with a dinghy at its center. It is the work of Boothbay artists Gayle Fraas and Duncan Slade, who have gone on to create large artworks for public spaces around Maine and the U.S. (Sam Lemonick photo)
Surely many Harpswell elementary students through the years have found their attention drifting to the colorful geometric decoration surrounding the school auditorium’s stage. Adults, too, perhaps as they sit through a Town Meeting.
The decorative border of the stage is the work of Boothbay artists Gayle Fraas and Duncan Slade. It consists of patterned tiles depicting the outlines of herons, cormorants, and evergreen trees in pink, purple, teal and other colors. Above center stage is a painted skiff and a winding rope, along with three-dimensional oars.
Slade says the elements were chosen to represent Harpswell. “We were making iconic what was part of the community,” he says.
The rowboat also holds metaphoric meaning. “The rowboat was representing the value of education — a vehicle to take you out into the world,” Fraas says.
It was the first stage the two had done. They primarily work with textiles, making decorative quilts. They couldn’t initially visualize a good place for their art in the new multiuse space. Fraas imagined the basketballs that would soon be bouncing off those walls.
Then they started thinking about the stage arch, also known as the proscenium. “Here was the chance to border the activity on the stage,” Slade says. At the time, they had just started experimenting with making frames for their quilts, another kind of border.
Slade says they were thinking about the kids who would use the room from the very beginning. They remembered the many times they had sat through assemblies and performances as kids, and how their eyes had wandered around those rooms.
A closeup of the artwork above the stage at Harpswell Community School. (Sam Lemonick photo)
The couple envisioned making parts of their proscenium stand out from the wall in three dimensions, but turning their drawn plans into reality was more complex than they had expected. A three-dimensional stair-step element running across the top appears to start in front of a series of jagged pink peaks and end behind it. They achieved the optical illusion by tapering the teal steps so they are thinner against the wall as the staircase climbs higher.
They also ran into trouble with the repeating design that extends down to the floor. The architect and builder chose a melamine-coated panel for the walls that would be easy to clean. But when the artists tried to silkscreen their design onto the material, the ink smeared right off. Instead, they decorated wooden panels and attached those to the wall.
Fraas and Slade’s design was selected from several artists’ proposals when the auditorium, which also serves as Harpswell Community School’s gym and cafeteria, was added to the existing school in the 1980s. A committee of Harpswell residents and an art professional were responsible for picking the design. It was paid for through the state’s Percent for Art program, started in 1982, which sets aside 1% of the budget of state-funded building projects for public art.
For Fraas and Slade, the Harpswell proscenium was one of the first of many public art projects. The partners say their early experiences of proposing and creating public art, including in Harpswell, helped them to develop a knack for making large public artworks, which are now displayed around Maine and the U.S.
Sam Lemonick is a freelance reporter. He lives in Cundy’s Harbor.
