Center Town Hall, Shirley Center, Mass.

The sky was colored in with the assistance of Melissa and Brandon Pierce and Laura. They are the small figures in the foreground. They did a very nice job, and gave me important lessons about drawing in sky completely. I wasn't entirely pleased with how the sky turned out in First Parish Meetinghouse. With this particular paper however, I didn't always have to fill in the sky color completely to get a nice effect. For example, see My Home.

The Pierces had recently moved to Shirley. Laura was an old hand. They kept me company for most of the time I was doing the drawing and later brought out an art kit they had gotten for Christmas and did drawings for me. Brandon disparaged my rendering of the building's surfaces saying it looked like stucco. I noted stucco was part of my cultural heritage as all the houses I used to live in were finished with it. And who wants to draw in all those lines for the siding anyway? It would just make the walls look like notebook paper. I seem to have had a heightened perception of the earth's curvature while doing this drawing.

The Town Hall was dedicated in 1848. It was struck by lightning in 1950 and rebuilt by Lucien Gionet.

April 15, 1996