News From Cram’s Corner

UPDATED JANUARY 2026 - click images to enlarge

This year saw the continued designing of the York Town Hall mural, followed by my building, painting and installing it in early October.

My team and I

Meeting my collaborators for the first time back in February of '24, I told them I'd tackled many different kinds of mural projects over the years, but had never produced anything quite like this. For starters, I knew next to nothing about the history of York, Maine. But my team, primarily comprised of local historians Kevin Freeman, Kevin McKinney, James Kences and Wayne Martin, quickly brought me up to speed. The challenge for us was not only to choose what got included in our 400 year overview of York's history, but how to present it fairly and honestly, while making it easily accessible to all.

Early black and white comp

We designed it as an interactive mural, four panels for four centuries, with a key to each panel alongside and a QR code, allowing viewers to click on any one of my 70 illustrations to learn more about that subject. My team made it clear that they didn't want to "whitewash" history, that along with the high points, our history wouldn't shy away from the indignities that happened along the way. This only excited me more about participating in the project.

Color mock-up of the 1600's panel

We worked on our design for many months. By November of 2024, we felt it would be a good idea share with the public what we'd been working on, and try to elicit feedback. One thing that we got loud and clear: there needed to be more women represented! We happily obliged. By March of '25, our designing was done, and the ball was finally in my court to produce the mural.

Painting panel #1

In my Eliot studio the four panels were cut out of DiBond aluminum, then prepped and base coated with Golden acrylics in a warm tone to harmonize with the cool color of the wall. The whole mural was penciled in first, then those lines were solidified with Burnt Sienna paint. Rendering the maps was difficult, but the large blowups Town Assessor Luke Vigue made me, representing surveys of York over time, helped enormously.

Painting panel #3

Technically this is a mural, but one done almost entirely with very tiny brushes. In that sense, it seems more like an enormous illustration job. My acrylic color work took months, working six, sometimes seven days a week to stay on track. It's not that my collaborators were cracking the whip (they weren't). But all of us were excited to wind this project up in the fall. By September I was done, and following my team's approval, I varnished the mural. Then one morning in October, Wayne, Kevin Freeman and I installed the four panels. Kevin produced the keys, Nate Losier the frames, and a festive unveiling took place in November.

The mural installed

Long before the mural was done, Susan and I had committed ourselves to hosting another Open Studio event the second weekend in December. So, with my commission behind me, I flew into creating five, new, fast and loose acrylic paintings on paper. I didn't want to get bogged down with framing or other presentational strategies, so I just hung the finished paintings with binder clips and left it at that.

Orange Rules the Day

The weather held, and there was a nice flow of people over the weekend, allowing me a good chance to talk with folks. By show's end, we'd done pretty well, selling, among other things, three of the five new paintings.

Companion Planting

Cleaning up afterward, we were left with a whole plate full of cookies, which Susan dropped off at our auto mechanic's down the street. That jogged his memory about the show, and he swung by and purchased three artworks. No surprise: two of the paintings he bought were of decrepit old vehicles!

Then, phew! It was time to kick back and call it a year.