Art scene takes an ‘atomic’ turn
By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
Editor's note: A name was misspelled in this story last week so we're running it again - corrected.
Putnam’s status as the art nucleus of northeastern Connecticut went atomic last week as a mural was unveiled at the Painted Baker Café in downtown Putnam.
Café owner Monique Maldonado said she’d been thinking about a mural for the large space behind the long counter for three years. “People always see a blank wall and they come in and say, ‘Oh, you should put a big screen TV there’ but I said, ‘No there’s art going there’.” She wanted a futuristic city going on the wall. She wanted the mural “residents” — robots, aliens and humans — all interacting together in harmony because she believes that harmony could exist. She wanted rockets, space ships and space cars “because I grew up in the ‘60s when the whole atomic era was very popular and the Jetsons and I have always thought that was really, really cool.”
She collected pictures of items she wanted. She also wanted a kind of “Where’s Waldo” for fun, too. Details explode on the mural. And many of them are personal. The Black Hawk helicopter is a nod to her son, Nick, who flies one for the National Guard. She loves chess so some characters in the mural are playing chess. She wanted WINY Radio there, too, in addition to the Painted Baker Café. Pancakes turn into buildings and a sunny-side up egg morphs into a space ship.
The Jetsons, near and dear to Maldonado’s heart, definitely belonged on the mural. “I figured Rosie is the best, the most recognizable.” There’s a building on the mural that is a takeoff of the radioactive donut sandwich — “we took it off the menu and made it into a building.” Food is very present in the mural – naturally.
Lots of animals, handpicked, populate the mural. And for sure, “I had to have the American flag. All my parents, my grandparents were in the military and I have two sons in the military, so absolutely!”
Maldonado said she loves how the mural goes from night to day.
She said she had asked her friend Amy Brunet who created her mural in downtown Danielson and Brunet recommended Jenn Brytowski of Jennerate. Brytowski made Maldonado’s dream a reality.
Artists Elizabeth Conway and Zoe D’Elia worked on the mural for two weeks.
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