Dennis artist creates mural for new Osterville Library

Walking into Lance Walker’s Fine Art Gallery in Post Office Plaza in Dennis Village during the past two months, one could not help notice the large painting sitting on two milk cartons in front of the other fine art on the walls.

On second look, it’s clear the painting is a work in progress with lots of green and blue open space between the two big buildings on the canvas. The red brick building with a cupola at the top and lots of white trim and windows is the clue what this oil painting is about.

The Osterville Village Library awarded Walker a commission to paint a mural to be hung in the new $5 million library, which is scheduled to open in late February or early March.

“I’m not a mural artist, but I can paint big,” Walker says. The canvas is 7 feet by 5-feet, but this is not your typical mural depicting identifiable buildings and scenes of an area.

Instead, what Walker has created a series of fine illustrations or vignettes of the village on the Cape’s south shore over a nautical chart backdrop of olive green and sea blue. That explains all the blue expanses that show Osterville’s several bays and the downward fingers that depict the water depth. “I’m a map person; I love charts, “Walker says.

“A lot of thought went into it. I was nervous at first,” he admits. “I wanted it to be special.”

 Walker started the mural in Nov. 9 and has put in 160 hours on the “basically finished” product as of this week. He has worked on it three hours a day from 6 to 9 a.m.

When Walker entered the new library for the first time while it was under construction, it had no interior walls or the cupola on top or landscaping. He had to envision much of it.

In addition to the library, the only other major building in the mural is the Crosby Boatyard, which Walker points out is the only business depicted. “It’s more of an icon,” he says.

Walker wanted the mural to have life, so he included people walking to the library, sitting in the adjacent park and golfing on the Wianno golf course. Dowses Beach in the lower half of the mural has tiny figures, which Walker says is intentionally low enough for a 3-year-old to see.

“The whole thing takes on the time of year when people are excited,” he says. Other details will include a windmill, a compass rose, the drawbridge and some sea birds and flags.

Only one sailboat is prominent on the mural, the Wianno Senior, on which former President John F. Kennedy was filmed and photographed during his visits to Hyannis Port.

The Kennedys are significant to Walker, who received a commission from Judge Edmund Reggie, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s father-in-law, to paint a large portrait of the senator’s boat, the Mya, for the senator and his daughter, Vicki Kennedy. Sen. Kennedy died before the painting was finished, but the judge gave it to his family as a Christmas present, Walker says.

The library’s capital campaign committee selected Walker for the mural even though he had not submitted an application. Someone recommended him, so he submitted a sketch he completed in an hour along with a proposed size, cost and how he would deliver and hang the mural.

Laurie Young, head of the committee, said the members selected Walker unanimously from among four finalists because they “felt his artistic proposal was the best fit for the new library.” She added, “It was a difficult selection due to the high quality of the other submissions.”

The criteria for selection included: previous experience with scale of work, artistic style, some form of realism (as opposed to massively contemporary); Cape home base and artistic reputation; fit of proposed image for a library setting.

Walker, 49, is primarily a landscape and seascape painter and largely self-taught. He dabbled a bit in drawing, but says he never did it seriously while he was a drummer in a band in Pennsylvania. He submitted a drawing to a contest and it won first place. That was 23 years ago.

Puerto Rican artist and singer Gilbert Colon noticed his work and asked if he wanted to paint with him. After two years, Walker says, “I started to grasp it and Colon said, ‘Lance, it’s the beginning of your journey. I think you have the tools.’”

Walker left the music business and went into architectural and technical drafting for nine years. “I had an eye for detail,” he said, which is evident in the library mural and much of his work.

In 2000, Walker moved to the Cape to pursue his art and met his wife, Linda Medeiros, who runs the business side of the gallery, which represents 12 artists with different styles. He shares the building with Ron Lindholm’s Cape Cod Picture Framing. Walker also does some framing. He is a member of the American Society of Marine Artists.

Young’s mural will hang on the library’s second floor at the top of the elevator landing in front of the large Wianno Avenue window. Names of “mural wall” contributors to the new building will flank the painting.

 The cost of the mural is being donated by the four children and four grandchildren of the late Janel Kisker Kesten, an avid reader who introduced her children to the Hyannis and Osterville libraries.  She and her husband, Robert, moved to Osterville in 1965 to buy and operate the East Bay Lodge. Their four children, Laurie Kesten Young, Donna Kesten Greene, Robert Kesten Jr. and John Kesten all live on the Cape or retain Cape ties.  The four grandchildren are Kelley Ervin, Janel Kesten, Ryan Kesten and Samantha Kesten. Mrs. Kesten died in 1967.

 “Her children felt this mural was a fitting memorial to her love of reading and libraries,” Laurie Young, one of the children, says.