Three young adult artists recently created original art for windows and an exterior wall at Sentimenti, the secondhand vintage and antiques store and local artisan boutique in the former Newtown Color Center location at 3 Queen Street. Business Co-Owner Sandra Rasmussen hopes it will be the beginning of an ongoing display that changes seasonally.

Acrylic paintings by Violet Assante-LaBash and Eileen Celli now adorn the western windows of the store, and chalk art by Alli Holden covers a large section of the building’s southern wall. Rasmussen expects to have at least one additional artist add their work to another open area within the next few weeks.

Along with husband Bart and daughter Danika, the longtime Newtown resident opened Sentimenti in November 2023. She originally envisioned a heavier focus on antiques and vintage items, but said they have been shifting more space in recent months to host original work by local artists.

“We are supporting local artists and artisans by providing a space to showcase and sell their art,” she said recently. Sentimenti offers paintings, jewelry, woodworking, candles, crocheted items and more. Rasmussen says approximately “95% of our local artists are from Newtown, and of all ages, including two artists who are in middle school.”

With the relocation out of town earlier this year of Queen Street Gifts & Treats, which formerly shared the northern business space at 3 Queen Street, Rasmussen made a concerted effort to invite artists who were losing their space to move into her shop. Many did, she said, leading to the creation of Newtown Artisan Space.

While the vast majority of the artisan space’s inventory is designed and consigned by artists, Rasmussen invited local artist Doug Calderone to create a painting for the store’s exterior last year. That painting, a large work on a wooden panel, dropped Scooby-Doo into the middle of the familiar view from Castle Hill Road. The humorous landscape was proudly displayed along an exterior wall for months.

Having watched daughter Danika go through the Newtown school system and art programs within, Rasmussen said she knows there are “very talented, artistic students that don’t often have public spaces to create art and showcase their talent. I wanted to find a simple, fun and more public way to allow them to create beautiful art and to have it seen by our community.”

She was inspired by Wynwood Walls, the street art museum in Miami, Fla., where artists paint directly on walls. Rasmussen discovered the unusual destination-museum during a visit in April.

“I just found it so fun and whimsical,” she shared. “I know we can’t do it to that extent here, but I thought I could take my own space and give these kids a chance to share their art.”

Art shows within schools are usually limited to family, faculty and fellow students, Rasmussen noted. “They’re somewhat contained. I thought this would be a fun way to let them show what they can do to a wider audience,” she said.

In the spring, Rasmussen issued a call for high school student artists interested in creating original art for up to five large spaces at her store. She invited those who responded to not only show her examples of their work, but to “walk around and get the vibe of the store,” she said.

This time Rasmussen let the artists create their own designs. The initial response to the invitation was “tremendous,” she said. “They came back almost immediately with concepts. I told them ‘It’s your canvas, do what you want.’”

One of the few caveats she gave them was to make things colorful, “but not cartoon,” Rasmussen said.

Two large scale paintings have now been painted onto the western-facing windows of her store and a large chalk drawing has been added to the building’s south-facing brick wall.

The Art On View

Violet Assante-LaBash, a rising senior at Newtown High School, spent approximately 14 hours over three visits to create and finish her large peacock painting. She went with the colorful bird, she said, because she thought “something colorful and bright would be good here.”

While her medium of choice is oil paint, she went with acrylics for her Sentimenti project. The challenge with that medium, she said, was it chipped easily. Weather and fluctuating temperatures also led to different drying times for the paint, she added.

Nevertheless, Assante-LaBash said transferring her design from study to the large glass panes was “pretty easy.”

Eileen Celli also said trying to use acrylics on the window “without accidentally scraping the paint off of it” was a big challenge. Her medium of choice is gouache. Nevertheless, she found the project overall easier than she expected it would be.

“I thought I would have to use many layers but only needed one or two” to complete her painting of a woman with flowing brown hair. A pair of flowers emerge from the window’s upper and lower right corners. A bumblebee is also part of the painting, flying through a few seeds floating through the air around the woman’s face.

It was not the first time Celli accepted the challenge to do a large-scale painting. The rising NHS junior did large set pieces for Reed Intermediate School’s production of The Wizard of Oz.

“This painting may have been the biggest face I’ve ever painted,” she did note.

Around the corner, Newtown High School rising junior Alli Holden filled her space with a large gold frame hosting a landscape scene. A rainbow begins from a cloud in the sky but bursts over the frame, growing in size over more of the brick wall she was allotted.

Below that image an antique clock and manual typewriter are shown on a desktop.

Both acrylic paintings are easily spotted from Queen Street by drivers and passengers alike. Similarly, Holden’s chalk work is equally visible from most locations within the adjacent parking lot at 5 Queen Street.

Readers are encouraged to enjoy the work, which is vibrant but not permanent. Rasmussen plans to issue another call for artists in a few months. The current art will be scraped off the windows and washed off the brick, and new art will be created for the exterior spaces, she said.

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Managing Editor Shannon Hicks can be reached at shannon@thebee.com.