AMY COTE

Staff photo and caption by Gregory Rec

Amy Cote's canvas can be difficult at times. When it's humid, her paints can run in a literal cascade of watercolors. She can't see the true colors of her work while she's painting. And she has to destroy her work so she can use the same canvas again.

Cote, a 24-year-old muralist from Saco, has made a business of painting scenes on storefront windows.

She started seven years ago at the Shaw's supermarket in Saco, where she worked as a cashier. Now it is her full-time job, and she paints at more than 130 stores throughout New England.

She has become accustomed to the vagaries of the work.

She solved the problem of paint oozing down glass moist with condensation by using a fan to dry the window.

It took more time to overcome the difficulty of painting a window backlit by bright light, which causes colors to look thinner and paler.

At first, she would only paint at night, so she could work against a black background. Now, after many years, she inherently knows how colors will appear on the outside without looking.

When her client wants a new decoration, Cote has to scrape off her previous mural before starting a new one. This impermanence used to bother her, but time has erased that too.

"I do it so much now that it doesn't bother me anymore," she says. "I still have favorites, so I take pictures of them."

This day at Lucky Loggers restaurant in Saco, Cote is painting a Thanksgiving scene. She works amid the murmur of the breakfast crowd and the din of the kitchen, painting the principal parts: a turkey, the Mayflower, an Indian toting a basket of food.

In her paint-splattered overalls, she scurries along the window, constantly picking up one of 16 plastic cups perched on the sill. The cups are her palette, each holding a different color or blend of colors.

After finishing the main parts of the mural, she contemplates a moment over a vanilla milkshake and then starts filling in empty spaces.

In a few deft strokes of a red brush, a pumpkin takes shape next to the turkey. With a green brush, grass grows around the bottom of the pumpkin, and a blue brush raises a sea around the Mayflower. Puffy clouds form in the sky from the twirl of a white brush.

As Cote paints grass along a rail fence, two passing women watch. "It's going to look nice," one says to the other. "It's going to look real nice."

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Peter Bloom


Judy Nisbett


Merrill Currier


Charlie Bassett


Caleb Farnum


Kevin Soucy


Abby Freeman


Russell Thompson