Connell Sanders

John Pagano is the artist Worcester deserves

SARAH CONNELL SANDERS

It took me a few minutes to place the compound of mill buildings on Webster Street before I recognized them from a warehouse party thrown by friends of friends, years ago. I could remember one girl in particular who wore a magnificent paper mache mask, two feet in diameter, and danced with abandon on the roof of a car while the owner urged her to climb down to safety. It wasn’t the sort of party I’d soon feel comfortable attending — not “adult” enough. But, for that one night, I was free to observe Worcester’s creatives in their natural habitat, unexposed and undetected.

The memory surfaced when my husband and I visited John Pagano’s studio on Webster Street to buy a painting for our new home a few weeks ago. We followed a labyrinth of heavy doors and wooden steps up and up to the third floor where the stairwells smelled somewhere between my elementary school art room and the old Tatnuck Bookseller.

Pagano greeted us with a scarf around his neck and a pair of spec-

LISTEN UP

VICTOR D. INFANTE needs to be answered right up front about the Negans’ new album, “Somethang to Fear”: Do you have to watch “The Walking Dead” to understand the album? The answer is an unequivocal “no,” because I have to confess, I have never watched a single episode of the AMC zombie drama. Weird, right? Sure, I have enough general pop culture knowledge to know that the band is named for the bat-wielding antagonist/antihero played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and that the album references the show often, but there was never a point where I felt lost in the tribute. Certainly, an aficionado of the show or the comic book series it’s based on might get more out of it than I did, but even if you don’t tacles balanced high on the bridge of his nose. His paintings were alive. Suggestive. Writhing and free like the girl had been atop the car so many years before. “Continuous movement,” he called it.

I was flattered when he asked me about my writing. His own work had hung beside contemporary greats such as Willie Cole, Doris Salcedo and Alice Neel. My little articles felt insignificant by comparison, but he pressed me for details.

“Have you read ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ by Philip Larkin?” he asked. I had not, but promised to seek out the 1964 poem about a man who finds himself surrounded by wedding parties on a Sunday train ride to London. He told me he thought I’d like it.

Pagano set us loose to explore hundreds of canvases spread across the three rooms of his studio space. He hoped we’d bring our own story to the painting we chose and fill in the blanks for ourselves. “They’re sort of like my children,” he said of his work, “It’s important they go to the right homes.”

We recognized our piece right away, struck by its physicality. Bold marks and repetitive symbols gave off the sensation of movement like ancient letters or film perforations — each one a racing caravan.

I went back to pick up the painting that Tuesday afternoon in the pouring rain. While I waited for his calling card to dry, Pagano showed me a series of pins he was tinkering with and asked if I had found the time to read Larkin’s poem. I was ashamed to not have done my homework, but he didn’t make me feel badly about it.

We hung the painting above our fireplace. We poured glasses of wine and played Leonard Cohen on vinyl. We began to examine the stories we could see in every brushstroke and tried to imagine the details concealed from our consciousness. We felt “adult.” Pagano’s canvas held all of the creative energy of a warehouse rave without any of the repercussions.

I played a recording of Larkin reading “The Whitsun Weddings” for my husband. The tone was sophisticated, the story savage. In his poem, chaotic characters dipped in and out of one another’s lives in a thousand configurations on a single train ride,

John Pagano’s paintings create a narrative using suggestive imagery, realism and abstraction.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SARAH CONNELL SANDERS

only to culminate in a collective “sense of falling.” Across generations and zip codes, the passengers remained united by a singular sensation, as if Larkin could tighten the breaks and zoom out to admire the whole of humanity.

Pagano’s work, like Larkin’s, minds the gap between realism and abstraction. He helps you see the quiet train car within the speeding motorcoach. The euphoric party girl within the understand every reference, the band gives you a straight-up punk album with horror and apocalyptic imagery which is pretty easy to grasp. When, in the opening number, “Die by the Bat,” “Live by the bat/die by the bat/ (expletive) is going down … head bashing all around,” there’s really no need to overanalyze symbolism. We’re in the territory punk has brought us since the Ramones’ “Beat on the Brat” and the Damned’s “Smash it Up.”

What makes the album work isn’t the fantasy/horror allusions, but rather the musicianship that the album’s built on. Take, for instance, the second song, “Rick’s a Prick,” presumably a reference to “Walking Dead” protagonist Sheriff Rick Grimes. Now, I don’t know much about the character, but having once been a young punk rock fan with … ahem emerging art collector. The continuous movement that binds us all together.

There is great value in attempting to absorb the full picture while refusing to ignore the fine details. A painting taught me that.

You can learn more about John Pagano’s work and request a private studio tour by contacting him through his website: https://johnpagano.info/

The Negans raise the ‘Dead’ with ‘Somethang to Fear’

There’s one question that

home.html. … issues with authority, the refrain of the title is pretty much all I need to know. Throw in the down-and-dirty speed metal guitar by Mark Zero and the truly thunderous percussion from Joe Z., and you’re now speaking punk’s universal language of aggressive defiance. By that same count, the Rev’s crunchy bass line grounds the next song, “Lizzie’s Lament,” and the layers to Jim Halfdead’s vocals coax a universality out of lyrics such as, “This little girl grew up in a world of pestilence/no wonder she kills things and brings them to the fence.” It’s probably a reference, but you don’t need to understand it. It might as well be the Boomtown Rats singing, “I Don’t Like Mondays.” The message shines through just fine.

The album really takes off with “Murderous Murder,” where, “Every-

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