Local artists designing a 32-foot mural for D.C.-area restaurant chain (2024)

Two Midcoast artists have been working on their third mural art piece since leasing a temporary studio in Wiscasset, this time producing a fun piece for a Washington, D.C.-area restaurant chain.

The artists, contemporary realist painter John Gable of Woolwich and figurative painter Christopher Cart of Hallowell, are working on a tongue-in-cheek piece featuring 50 celebrities in a restaurant bar scene for the Great American Restaurants chain.

“Not every artist can work together, but we just have a lot of fun,” Gable said.

Great American Restaurants commissioned the Gable and Cart mural for a location in Gainesville, Virginia, that has yet to be named. According to Gable, the building will not be completed until next year.

Gable met Cart several years ago after seeing a mural Clark painted on Pleasant Street in Brunswick.

“We have both done murals separately for a number of years,” Cart said.

The duo met at Gable’s Bath studio and completed two big mural projects together for Great American Restaurants.

For 27 years, Gable had an 80-foot mural studio above Renys in Bath that was ideal for his work; however, he closed it in 2021. Four months ago, he received a call from Great American Restaurants requesting a 32-foot mural.

Painting on a large canvas

The process began by ordering a canvas and creating a few sketches to give the client an idea of the mural’s direction. Gable and Cart painted the white canvas over with a medium brown to make a good base for creating light and dark colors. Cart chalked the people onto the canvas and drew them in with other colors.

“Once we get into individual figures, we’ve got this list of celebrities we can include in, and we figure out who is going to go forward and who is going to go back,” Cart said. “We collect a whole bunch of reference pictures because you can’t have everyone facing forward like a snapshot. You got to learn how to do Denzel Washington in a profile.”

In one section, celebrities including Willy Nelson, Kenny Rogers, Shawn Connery and Snoop Dog are depicted playing poker. The mural is scheduled to be completed by the end of September.

Cart likes painting big, using broad brush strokes to fit the scale on the mural canvas, with the scene flowing from end to end.

“We are, as painters, both experienced enough to morph our style when we want to,” Cart said. “We have our own style when it’s just us, but we can morph our style enough so it feels like one artist is doing the work.”

Gable and Cart’s artistic ventures

Most of Gable’s paintings are shown at the Portland Art Gallery, while Cart does his art commissions from his home in Hallowell.

In 1994, Clyde’s, a Washington, D.C.-based restaurant group that owned some of Gable’s rowing paintings, called Gable and asked him to paint a mural called the “Age of Style and Design in an Art Deco,” featuring European automobiles of the era. Clyde’s was creating high-end restaurants in the area to attract unique political crowds. They liked Gable’s style for his Charles River rowing prints in one of their restaurants in Reston, Virginia.

Immediately after his commission work for Clyde’s, Gable received a commission call from Great American Restaurants to do mural work for them. Gable has also done historical portrait work for the Smithsonian Institution and the historic Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.

So far, Gable has completed 25 murals in the D.C.-area alongside his 50 historic gallery paintings, mostly in D.C., and a few commissions in Europe.

Previously, Gable was the assistant chief designer at Pontiac and spent many years designing Trans-Am Firebirds at GM in Warren, Michigan. When he turned 35 in 1979, he left his chief designer career behind to paint in Kennebunkport. Gable moved to Woolwich on Montsweag Bay in 1989.

Cart’s background as an artist started in book and magazine illustration work for publishers including Random House and William Morrow.

Some of Cart’s paintings can be found at the Harbor Square Gallery in Camden, and he has an upcoming watercolor show in Hallowell on Aug. 16 at the Blanchard Art Gallery.

He got into mural work in the late 1980s when a friend who owned a restaurant in Seattle, Washington, commissioned him for an Italian dinner scene. Other mural work that Cart has done is the mural at the Capitol Judicial Center in Augusta, which he commissioned through the Percent for Art Program, and the City of Ships mural for the Main Street Bath organization.

“Chris had all the gifts that I needed to help me create these murals,” Gable said.

Cart was born in Farmington, and his family moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was in eighth grade in the early 1970s. After Cart graduated from high school, he moved to co*ker College in Hartsville, South Carolina.

Two years later, he moved to Seattle to continue his education at the University of Seattle and lived there for eight years before moving to Phippsburg in 1987.

After Gable and Cart complete their current mural project, Great American Restaurants has been considering eight to 10 new projects. If Gable and Cart get another mural commission piece, they may extend their lease at the Wiscasset Marketplace.

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