Community Portrait Project to Display Alton's Unique Cast of Characters

ALTON – Alton is a town full of characters.

From all walks of life, Altonians work hard together to form a community, which by most accounts is pretty unique. A local artist is working to display that visage of community by painting folks she believes most embody the current atmosphere of Alton. They come from different backgrounds and her choices are incredibly diverse. This Friday night, Monica Mason will debut her work – called “The Community Portrait Project” at the Post Commons, located at 300 Alby Street. The gallery showing is from 7-10 p.m. and is open for the community to enjoy.

“The 'Community Portrait Project” is my series of painted portraits of various members of our community,” Mason said in an email. “This project was a sort of sequel to a commissioned set of historic portraits I painted for Hugh Halter, owner of the Post Commons, here in Alton. The first meeting I had with Hugh, we discovered a shared interest in some of Alton's past citizens who had done some pretty amazing things, but had been mostly forgotten with the passage of time.

“We've all heard of the usual luminaries of Alton; Robert Wadlow, Elijah Parrish Lovejoy, Miles Davis, etc., but what about Joseph Raglin, the man who was such a skilled artisan bricklayer that he landed a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records in the 1920s as the world's fastest bricklayer? The idea to honor Mr. Raglin seemed long overdue, and so I began his eight-foot-tall commemorative portrait, along with a portrait of William Sachtleben, the first man to peddle a bicycle around the world. A third historic portrait of Josephine Beckwith, a local civil rights leader, is also to be completed and displayed.”

Mason painted those large portraits in the same style as her Community Portrait Project. They are colored in various shades of blue used as the basis of all skin tones in traditional painting. The blues she uses are the foundation upon which traditional painters add various skin tones.

“Blue is a color, which is a common component in mixing flesh tones regardless of race, and therefore, blue can be perceived as a color, which unified us all,” she said. “To present some of the diversity of our community, it seemed blue might be a color of unity among our citizens.”

That love of diversity and inclusion is on display with the gallery. Mason's choices for life-like portraits the same shades of blue include folks like Sheila Curry, or “Granny” as she is known by her friends and customers at her clothing and uniform shop on College Avenue, Benjamin Golley, whose business, Today Beauty Supply and the adjacent haven for neighborhood kids, Today's Place, and tattoo artist Chris Hinkle for whom Mason argued when Grand Piasa Body Art was making its move to Broadway.

“My hope is that people will come to this exhibit and see a familiar face or two in the paintings, connect a name to the face and hopefully be inspired by what their fellow citizens are doing to improve the quality of life in our community,” she said. “There are no political goals in this project, the goal is mostly to honor some of our citizens who make Alton a better, more interesting place, and secondly for me as an artist to depict some of the interesting people who live and/or work here. My hope is that this exhibit may bring together some folks who perhaps may not typically get together socially.”

Mason has been an artist for most of her life. She is a retired figure-drawing/anatomy professor. She said her interests have always been in “anatomically-informed” depictions of the face and human body. Her style includes mapping out a streamlined skull first on paper or canvas onto which she builds the musculature of the face and neck before adding tissue and the effects of aging onto the face. She said she “advocates” for the “anatomical fluency of the Renaissance and Baroque masters of the 16^th and 17^th centuries as well as modern painters like Lucien Freud, Alberto Giacometti, John Curren and Elly Smallwood.

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