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Guilford Grads Save First Mural of Internationally Renowned Artist

By the time you read this, the walls will have begun to come down at the former Guilford High School (GHS). Thanks to the efforts of some GHS alums, one wall in particular escaped the wrecking ball by coming down—carefully—a bit earlier: a 32 foot-long shorebird mural in the school’s media center/library, painted in 1979 by a then-GHS senior with a knack for illustrating birds.

The artist is David Sibley, a New York Times bestselling author/illustrator and one of the world’s foremost ornithologists. His signature title is The Sibley Guide to Birds, now in its second edition.

Though today he carries an international reputation (he had just arrived home in Concord, Massachusetts from leading birding tours deep in the Denali, Alaska wilderness when he spoke with Living), his start in Guilford as an artist was humble, if no less auspicious. He cites Richmond Curtis, retired banker and former Guilford Land Conservation Trust president who volunteered at the school, as an early influence.

“Richmond Curtis was interested in birds and he made it all happen. He came up with the idea of the murals for the school walls in Guilford. I first painted murals at Cox Elementary School and then in the stairwell at Baldwin Middle School. I think they are still there,” Sibley says. “Rich sought out the kids who were shy and had something to give, but where no standard existed in the school like sports or band.”

For Sibley, that “something to give” to the community was his incredible ability to illustrate birds accurately, which first surfaced at the age of seven, according to his father Fred Sibley, a retired ornithologist at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and the younger Sibley’s earliest inspiration.

“David would count and draw every feather even at a young age to get each bird just right,” Fred Sibley recalls, adding, “Who knew he’d go on to become so famous?”

It’s that exactitude of illustration—mostly self-taught—that has made David Sibley a household name among the nation’s 47 million birdwatchers, following in the footsteps of the late Roger Tory Peterson and his 1934 seminal book A Field Guide to the Birds.

While Peterson is regarded as the inventor of the modern field guide, the Audubon Society calls Sibley “heir to the great birder and artist Roger Tory Peterson, placing him in a long line of artist-naturalist hybrids that leads straight back to John James Audubon himself.”

For all his professional achievements, there’s something he hasn’t topped since his GHS days.

“It is by far the largest painting I’ve ever made,” Sibley notes of the mural the size of a movie theater screen, the result of “the audacity of a teenager.”

Unable to recall exactly how he projected his initial pencil and watercolor test sketches onto the wall to paint with proper dimensional accuracy, Sibley concedes with a laugh, “I think I just did it by eye.”

He did recall, however, that since the painting was so large, “it needed a lot of paint,” and thus he used latex house paint, one quart of the right colors at a time, purchased from a local store.

Enter the Rescuers

The 32- by 7-foot scene—inspired by a group of rocks located off Guilford’s Chaffinch Island area and featuring some two dozen herring and great black-back gulls—won its share of admirers over the following decades—which is fortunate, as the half-century old high school will be razed this summer to make way for the opening of new $100 million high school this fall.

When it was decided that the town needed a new high school, a number of people who knew of the Sibley mural approached former school principal Carl Balestracci, Jr., to see what could be done about saving the painting. As both a former principal and first selectman in Guilford—and an avid birder and carver of shorebird decoys—Balestracci approached both the school administrators and the school building committee.

A fee of $10,000 was proposed to the building committee, but when the company offering to remove the mural—which was painted onto the wallboard of a non-weight bearing wall—couldn’t guarantee the painting would not be destroyed during removal, the committee voted down the expenditure and Balestracci was back to square one.

After further discussions, funds to pay for a less expensive team of local carpenters was finally approved by the building committee.

To Balestracci’s pleasant surprise, however, the contractors that he solicited ended up volunteering their time on June 22 to skillfully cut the wallboard down from the wall and remove the mural in six, four-foot sections. Each carpenter desired to contribute to his own memory of the school and the teachers who got them started on the road to successful adulthood.

That team included Mike Donofrio of East Guilford Construction and his assistants Tim Cox and Joe Malatesta, and Chris Frohlich of Frohlich Painting and Wallpaper.

The hope now is that the Sibley high school mural will find another venue in town—preferably in the new high school—in which to hang for public viewing for the next hundred years.

If it ends up permanently displayed inside the new high school, Sibley has vowed to return help restore it to like-new condition.

“It would be hard to resist the temptation to touch up the painting, to repaint the seams,” Sibley says.

“We are going to be known in the future for what we value,” Balestracci says. “The work of our students saved for the future is very, very important.”