Date: Fri 13-Aug-1999

Publication: Bee

Author: KAAREN

Quick Words:

Turner-Hall-mural-Savings-Bank

Full Text:

Touching Up A Masterpiece: The Mural At Newtown Savings Bank

(with cuts, new photos)

BY KAAREN VALENTA

When Newtown Savings Bank reopens its main lobby this fall after extensive

renovation, there will be at least one familiar sight remaining. The mural of

Newtown's Main Street by the artist Elizabeth Turner-Hall will stretch across

the lobby on a dropped ceiling over the desks of bank personnel.

It is the second time the mural has been moved because of bank renovations,

and the second time the bank had some problems locating the artist.

Now a resident of New Haven, Elizabeth Turner-Hall was a resident of Newtown

in 1964 and was then known as Elizabeth Hoeffner when she was tapped to paint

the mural for the bank.

"The bank wanted a mural that would reflect something of the history and

special character of Newtown," Ms Turner-Hall recalled recently. After much

discussion between the artist and the bank's board of trustees, it was decided

a representation of civic and commercial buildings on Main Street would be

appropriate. The intent was not to show familiar features as they once were,

or as they appeared in 1964, but rather to create an impression as interpreted

by the artist.

A one-sixth scale sketch was done by the artist and served as a working model

for the actual painting.

"I did sketches, then painted on ‹-inch masonite panels in the basement in

front of the vault," she recalled.

The panels were first covered with three coats of white gesso as a base. Next,

Liquitex colors that had been mixed by the artist were used for the painting.

These pigments have as a medium a plastic resin, emulsified in water. Liquitex

becomes insoluble as soon as the water evaporates, so the colors are

non-fading and the surface of the painting is extremely durable.

The colors were applied with rollers as well as with brushes. The goal was a

tapestry-like effect which would become an integral part of the architectural

setting and colonial decor of the bank.

The finished mural covered a space approximately 27 feet long and 7« feet

high. It was fortuitous that the artist worked on removable panels, because 22

years later the mural had to be taken down and stored for safekeeping while

lobby renovations were going on. By then, Ms Turner-Hall had moved to New

Haven and remarried. Then-NSB President Ken Adams had to ask area newspapers

for help in locating her.

"When I did the mural I lived on Cedar Hill Road with my [first] husband David

Hoeffner, and our children Peter and Laura," Ms Turner-Hall said recently. "We

had moved to Newtown in 1959."

For many years the artist had drawn much of the inspiration for her work from

the Boothbay Harbor region of the Maine coast. During the years she lived in

Newtown, she taught art courses at Danbury State College (now Western

Connecticut State University), Center School in Brookfield, and in the Newtown

Adult Education program.

"We moved to New Haven because David went into the architecture program at

Yale and I got a position as a professor at Southern Connecticut State

University, where I stayed until I retired," Ms Turner-Hall said.

In New Haven her life took a new turn as she returned to a theme that had

intrigued her years before. In 1951 her thesis painting at the University of

Illinois, where she received bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art, had

been of Duke Ellington and his orchestra.

"I had started a life-long love of his music, and I remember thinking `I want

to paint the way he makes music,'" she said.

This eventually came to pass when, in 1975, she married Al Hall, the noted

bass player, who lived and worked in New York City.

"I hung out in the clubs, met and became friends with many great musicians,

and sketched right on the spot almost all of the time," she said. "I started

paintings of the musicians and my response to their music with a new sense of

freedom and authority."

Along the way Ms Turner-Hall played the piano and discovered improvisation.

"No need for printed music, just a memory for a vast variety of tunes, and a

lot of listening to the great jazz pianists," she said. "This helped me to

understand what it was all about -- to improvise on a theme."

"In 1984 all of these forces, experiences [and] new dimensions were ready to

swing together into my painting," Ms Turner-hall said. "There was no

predetermined plan, they were improvisations. "

Between 1984 and 1988, the year Al Hall died, she executed a series of 21

paintings based on the jazz theme. Her work has been exhibited at various

locations including the Duke Ellington Creative Arts High School in

Washington, DC, in 1989, and the Paul Mellon Art Center, Choate Rosemary Hall,

in Wallingford in 1996.

In 1987, when renovations began at Newtown Savings Bank, bank officers began

searching for the artist who had painted their mural. They finally located Ms

Turner-Hall in New Haven and asked her to assist with the relocating of the

mural.

"It was to be wrapped around the wall behind the tellers," she said. "It was

moved, put up and I touched it up."

Elizabeth Turner-Hall became chairman of the department of art at SCSU in 1982

and a professor emeritus in 1992, culminating a career that included a total

of 36 years of college and university teaching.

This year, when renovations began again in the lobby of the Newtown Savings

Bank, the panels were removed, and once more a search began for the artist. As

soon as she was located, Ms Turner-Hall again traveled to Newtown to touch up

the panels and cover the screw heads used to install them on the wall.

"The mural was a little larger than the available space so we had to trim a

little from the edges of some of them to make it fit," she said. "I don't

think that anyone would notice.

"I like the new setting very much," she said. "The color on the walls on

either side of the painting is just right. The new arrangement -- not going

around the corner like it did after the last renovation -- is better, and the

clock [on the painted clock tower of Edmond Town Hall] is working."

The current renovations are the fourth major renovation project at the bank

since it opened in 1909. The mural, and the rest of the bank's extensive

renovations, will be on view at a grand reopening celebration which is

expected to be held in September.