Jeff Weaver: Witness to Gloucester
By Chris Munkholm
July 5, 2023
Jeff Weaver’s gallery and studio at 16 Rogers Street.
The following portrait of Jeff Weaver reflects a recent interview, when the artist generously shared his collection of memories from fifty years of life in Gloucester, a city and terrain now distilled into his large body of artwork. This subsequent COSMOS feature article seeks to understand the man behind the canvases. And to appreciate the artistic explorations which now converge into this advanced stage of his career and the pending solo exhibition at Cape Ann Museum. —CM
It is Saturday afternoon at 16 Rogers Street, where Jeff Weaver holds court from a corner in his gallery. People drift in and out of the space, a mix of old friends and passersby, with Jeff engaging all in relaxed conversations. The gallery, situated in the heart of Gloucester with a short walk to Café Sicilia, exists in a building that once reached all the way to the harbor before being transected by the construction of Rogers Street.
Interior views of Jeff’s Rogers Street studio.
The gallery interior retains an old-world charm with solid wood carpentry, lofty ceilings, and a large sliding door that once controlled a loading dock. Apart from the electricity and track lighting, the spare elegance resembles artists’ studios depicted in Florence Italy, circa the 18th century. And like those distant artists from a less mobile society, Jeff Weaver paints the city he lives and works in. Gloucester’s signature scenes, coastlines, waters, wharves, and structures. He knows this city, in every season and from every angle of the sun.
The pending retrospective at the Cape Ann Museum, This Unique Place, will be a tribute to his fifty years of painting in this city, always with an ever-searching eye for the essence of Gloucester.
Scene From a Window, 1974. Charcoal on paper, 12½ x 17 inches. Private Collection.
Always Drawing
Jeff’s life originated in Framingham, Massachusetts, surrounded by a family of many talents. His father, an optometrist, made screen prints as a hobby and painted large animals on Jeff’s bedroom walls. Giraffes, elephants, dogs, foxes were the visual menagerie of Jeff’s childhood. His aunt was a fashion illustrator for the Boston Globe and his brother became a photographer.
But Jeff’s drive to create art originated from within his own young soul. Jeff remembers that he was always drawing, as far back as the age of six. That is simply what he did. As his inborn talent emerged, neighbors requested portraits and his eighth-grade art teacher asked him to teach the class. At this early stage Jeff only made representational renderings. His mother would sit for hours for a portrait.
When his awe of Norman Rockwell’s artwork became evident, Jeff’s father drove him out to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to meet the renowned artist. They arrived unannounced, but Mrs. Rockwell graciously escorted the visitors out to the barn, and to the studio where her husband was working on a Saturday Evening Post cover. Mr. Rockwell paused from his project and attentively indulged the aspiring artist with a careful look through his portfolio of portraits. The artist later sent Jeff a note of encouragement, but the letter was unfortunately lost. Perhaps some flickers from the aesthetic torch of artistry passed from a legendary artist to one with a future destiny.
An Immersive Education and Affordable Gloucester
Once Jeff entered high school, creating art became his passion, his identity, and the only course of study that he wanted to pursue. Jeff enrolled at Burlington High School, which offered an unusually progressive art education and total freedom to explore mediums and genres. Since he was already adept at figures and portraits, he gravitated towards sculpture. Jeff remembers many trips to Stoneham Zoo, where he liked to draw animals as an anatomical exercise. And of course, the inevitable cartoons of teachers to the amusement of his cohorts.
While a year at the Boston Museum School topped off his formal art education, Jeff felt out of step with the prevailing Pop Art trends of the early 70s. It was time for him to venture forth, to hone his own artistic direction. But where to?
During his youth, the Weaver family made many summertime day trips to Gloucester. Whether it was the low cost of housing or youthful memories, he was attracted to this city on an island, facing forward into the Atlantic. After a winter rental on the Back Shore he found a place on Beach Court. Although other artists were occupying the building, including Frank Federico, it was not an artist scene per se. The housing was affordable and surrounded by captivating scenery. He lived there for five years. The next move was to a flat above the current restaurant BISHCO, in the building that once housed the oldest bank in the country, Gloucester Bank. Only a minute away from his present-day studio, it seems that Jeff Weaver settled where he was meant to be.
First the Signage and Murals
Photo showing the mural Jeff painted above the entrance to Virgilio’s.
During Jeff’s early years in Gloucester he could always be found sketching and painting. But this activity was unfortunately not a source of income. As life often proceeds through accidental encounters and the pressure to survive, he met the owner of a produce distribution company, with trucks. Jeff’s first commercial commission was to paint the signage on a delivery truck. And thus began a career in commercial art which lasted for a couple of decades. Today he remembers with gratitude master woodworker, Kasimir Stachewicz, who emigrated from Poland to Gloucester, and taught Jeff the meticulous craftsmanship of lettering. An early project, the signage for Virgilio’s, is preserved in a photograph of its founders.
The sign painting activity soon expanded into the creation of colorful murals, with more than thirty original Weaver murals eventually incorporated into the Gloucester environs. Most of the outdoor murals have since deteriorated with weather and age. The Cape Ann Lanes façade was a major commission, and Jeff fondly recalled the original art deco design which once enlivened the building’s entrance, and which is now sadly covered over with white paint.
Cape Ann Lanes with Weaver mural, prior to renovations.
For two decades Weaver worked as a commercial artist, doing his “Fine Art” on the side, and selling a few pieces here and there. One day a painting fetched a price that exceeded a commercial project. This transaction produced more than the sale of a painting. Jeff put away the tools of his commercial trade and decided to focus exclusively on his true calling. A friend, Mac Bell, helped Jeff with his first studio space. Coincidentally, Mac Bell was relaxing in the current Weaver studio during the COSMOS interview, while a friend purchased a piece of art. Gloucester is that type of town, people helping each other, becoming friends, remaining friends.
A commitment to the artist’s life also required tending to the business side of the occupation. Originally Jeff accepted commissions and was represented by galleries, the standard means of distribution. But his appealing paintings of Gloucester soon created many avid collectors who sought out his newest works. Jeff now only sells directly and does no advertising. But for the new collector or the curious, he can always be found in his Rogers Street gallery on Saturday afternoons with his current works for sale and ample hospitality for visitors.
A Fine Art of Realism and Composition
Weaver is now decades into his dedicated artistic practice. His reputation has ascended in this historically important region that produced the Cape Ann School of Art and continues to have a large and active community of artists. Jeff Weaver paintings seem to draw even more beauty from the arresting topography of Gloucester environs. Through his eyes we see Gloucester anew or askew. The natural and manmade elements combine into compositions of light and color. While Jeff’s work is categorized as existing in the American Realist tradition, his paintings seem to hover around a heightened reality. A canvas can become a moment in time, light, space, and movement, all magnified in a frozen section of a Gloucester scene.
Green Factory Wall, 2018. Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches. Collection of Tamsin Aspinall.
The 1990s Pivot
Jeff emphasized during our discussion that art is not reproduction or replication, and that “art requires that there is something inside you that must come out.” And while his paintings which are driven by subject matter are appealing, it is the design of the painting that is fundamental to the art and to an enhanced sense of perception. Jeff observed that an artist can paint a sunset, but it should not be as a representational work. And he quoted the wry comment of artist George Nick, “A lot of crime is committed in the name of sunsets.”
The Organization of Shapes
Paintings by Piet Mondrian.
In our discussion about the appeal of his art, Jeff ruminated on how his sign painting expertise today enriches his work. As he reflected, sign painting is graphic design, where small increments of placement on a 2-dimensional surface form a composition. He cited the artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), known for his minimalist compositions of line and form, and how he would make a single minor adjustment in the placement of a line, and thus determine the difference between success and failure. Today, Jeff considers himself to be an atypically design conscious artist. He believes the influence of his commercial period drives the aesthetics of his composition, and its effect on how people perceive his work.
Jeff agrees with the American artist Edward Dickinson (1891-1978) who, when asked What is Art?, responded after a thoughtful delay, “Art is the organization of shapes”.
Left: Shadows, Birdseye Factory, 2013. Oil on panel, 12 x 16 inches. Private Collection. Right: The Red House, 2010. Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches. Private Collection.
An Artist Always on the Prowl
With his own truck and boat, navigating a city and coastline of possibilities, Jeff is in a continuous search for scenes that deserve immortalization. When he sees a potential prospect, he will make a note or take a photograph, and then add to the roster of candidates scribbled on a notepad in the corner of his studio desk.
The artist in his studio.
Once a decision is made to create a new work, Jeff will sometimes make preliminary studies to work out the composition. But not always. He now operates with a design acuity which has grown into an automatic sense of structure. He primarily paints outdoors as a permanent plein air painter of Gloucester, working in all seasons, never exhausting the infinite corners of this city and coast. Sometimes a painting will be completed back in the Rogers Street studio, in a paint splattered easel behind his desk.
With fifty years of scanning the terrain, Jeff possesses a visual encyclopedia of Gloucester. But he has also witnessed, and learned about, unpopular alterations to the historical scenery, with sections decimated and now never to be seen by artists, residents, or visitors.
A Gloucester Lost, Never to Be Painted Again
The Gloucester of 1972, when Jeff arrived, was a time when the harbor was filled with wooden and steel vessels, no fiberglass crafts. Only a few buildings remained from the glorious fishing years of the 1800s. He remembers that many residents were speaking Italian, a language he never heard back in Burlington. Virgilio’s really did provide the Bread of the Fisherman, packing cartons with 20 loaves of bread, 20 cans of tomatoes, and so on, and the crates ported off to the boats waiting at the docks.
And while Jeff came to know the city and buildings of that era, he also learned of an earlier period when much of the city’s historical landscape was removed. Major alterations to the city’s architectural and coastal identity started during the Johnson Administration’s urban renewal of the 1960s, and resulted in drastic changes to the character of the city.
Above: Scenes from Gloucester before urban renewal. Below: The Fitz Henry Lane House stands alone on a hill, thankfully preserved from the wrecking ball.
Gloucester has always been a living/working community, and the harbor at that time was ringed with homes, wharves, and buildings, some dating back to the 18th century. The urban renewal wrecking ball literally destroyed much of the coastal construction, from just past the Gloucester House and running along the harbor. As Jeff commented, the waterfront is now unrecognizable from the pre-urban renewal era. Mercifully, someone had the awareness to preserve the Fitz Henry Lane house (aka “the Stone Jug”). But alas, the Fishermen’s Institute, for itinerant fishermen, was destroyed along with so many other precious buildings that symbolized the era when Gloucester was the oldest and proudest fishing port in the country. Learn more about the effects of urban renewal on the City of Gloucester on Cape Ann Museum’s Google Arts & Culture page.
The Stone Jug, 2021. Charcoal and pastel on archival board, 18 x 18 inches. Private Collection.
Then, to add to the spoilage, the vinyl siding industry arrived. In spite of a campaign to stave off such modernization, vinyl eventually covered many once elegant and historic wooden homes, producing further damage to the city’s original character.
With his keen eye for composition and the beauty of character, Jeff understands how visual representation can affect people’s experience of a place. He laments the loss of the waterfront’s architectural integrity and its symbolism of Gloucester’s working class existence.
Jeff asserts that preservation of the waterfront would have been a magnificent monument to Gloucester’s historical identity as an unrivaled fishing port. And, he further speculated, a preserved Gloucester would have become a precious historical attraction and an important source of economic commerce.
Time does march on, and the new business plans replace the old. But in the eye of an artist, the ghosts of lost Gloucester are paintings that will never take form. And memories that will eventually disappear.
While packing my equipment after the two-hour session of poignant memories, I asked Jeff if he had anything else to say about the Gloucester that he loves today:
“Have you had the chicken soup at Café Sicilia? Every Monday, you must try it.”
Christiane Munkholm is the Founder and Editor of Cape Ann COSMOS: Arts, Science & Entertainment, a natural consequence of her lifelong involvement in art & dance, and a career in bioscience technology innovation, with many patents. Her formal education includes Parson’s School of Design, Pratt Institute, Cranbrook, Tufts University PhD Chemistry, and countless dance studios. She is the author of Atlas Decrypted, a literary analysis derived from the science of chemistry. Christiane is the Founding Executive Director of Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute (2013-2019) and resides in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts.
