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Irresistible force behind ArtWalk
Co-workers marvel at Annapolis illustrator Sally Wern Comport’s energy, selflessness
The Capital, Sept 22, 2007
By Earl Kelly, Staff Writer
J. Henson - The Capital
Illustrator Sally Wern Comport, a Providence resident and a prime creator of the public art display Annapolis ArtWalk, works on a book illustration in her home studio. Friends say Ms. Comport has boundless energy and encourages other artists. She has been a professional illustrator since age 15, and is launching a new part of her career producing large pieces of art for display inside and outside of buildings.
If the “little engine that could” was 5 feet 3 inches tall with blond hair, and zipped around Annapolis on a mint-green motor scooter, the little engine’s name would be Sally Wern Comport.
Ms. Comport is the professional illustrator whose creativity and drive have made Annapolis’ public art display, ArtWalk, a reality.
Her energy surges are so pronounced that ArtWalk co-director Chuck Walsh, calls her “Spikes.”
“I have always made a living drawing and making art,” Ms. Comport, 51, said recently as she navigated through her cluttered studio in the basement of her Providence home. “I have been working as an illustrator since I was 15 years old.”
“Most days, it’s 12 to 14 hours, and it’s often seven days a week,” she said. Ms. Comport gets up at 5 a.m. “almost every day” and goes to her drawing board. Her idea of sleeping late is 6 a.m., but she generally tries to avoid such sloth and indolence.
“I am a 4:30 a.m.-er some days,” she said. “I have no idea how to sleep in; I can’t do it. I sort of gave up sleeping when my (first) daughter was born.” Ms. Comport illustrates books, magazines and newspapers for some of the world’s biggest publishers.
“This is my Korean ‘Hamlet,’” she said holding up a translated children’s books she illustrated, “and I have a Swedish ‘How to Disappear.’”
In juxtaposition to the children’s books, Ms. Comport illustrates for U.S. News & World Report magazine, Harvard Business Review and The Boston Globe. Ms. Comport said she knows that her success does not belong to her alone. She described her husband, Allan Comport, for example, as “husband, supporter, counselor, friend.”
“I can’t do things without positive people around me, and my husband has always been there for me,” she said. “He cooks, keeps house, shops and tends to the children when I get busy on a project. When I used to get busy with a project, he would say he ‘kept me fed and watered down by the drawing board.’”
The circle of “positive people” goes well beyond the Comport household, too. When asked to list a handful of people who have been most instrumental in making ArtWalk a reality, Ms. Comport wrote by each name, “Doer.”
“I have great neighbors who help me all the time; John Menocal, president of Corning Construction, is one. Chuck Walsh, who I ran into working out at the gym, has been a mentor. My neighbor, Robert Giffen, built that library ladder for me,” she said pointing to her floor-to-ceiling wall of art and historical reference books. “He came in and saw the (rickety) one I had built for myself and took pity on me.”
“Life is a collaborative effort ... it has got to be,” she said. “I used to cloister myself and just crank out art. I now realize how much I enjoy these collaborative efforts.”
ArtWalk has been a major collaborative effort, Ms. Comport said.
As part of the widespread exhibit, on Wednesday, one of Ms. Comport’s largest paintings, that of Anne Catharine Green, America’s first female publisher, will be mounted on the side of the Severn Bank Building at Westgate Circle.
The painting measures 6 feet by 11 feet.
Green, an Annapolis resident, inherited The Maryland Gazette from her husband, Jonas Green, when he died in 1767.
At age 45, after giving birth to 14 children, Green not only took over the business but was able to keep the contract to serve as the Colony’s provincial printer. As publisher, Green changed newspapers forever, when she required letter writers to reveal their names if their letters were to be published, Ms. Comport said.
Green also advocated the rights of colonists but died in 1775, a month before the first battle in the War for Independence.
Another painting, to be installed along with the Anne Catharine Green piece, shows a man operating a Colonial-era printing press at The Gazette, now the country’s longest-running newspaper. That painting measures 6 feet by 9 feet.
Other works by Ms. Comport will be installed later this year on the Newman Park fence, viewable from the Compromise Street area.
This painting will depict craftsmen of Eastport, who helped make Annapolis the city it is today.
When completed, ArtWalk will feature works by five area artists — Ms. Comport, Sy Mohr, Greg Harlin, George “Lassie” Belt and the late Marion Warren. The art will be exhibited for three years on designated buildings around town.
A montage by Mr. Mohr was mounted on the harbor master’s building in March, and a painting by Mr. Harlin, of John Paul Jones’ ship, was installed in June on the Naval Academy wall.
Six of Mr. Warren’s enlarged photographs were installed last month in the parking alcove next to Stan and Joe’s Salon on West Street. In coming months, works by Mr. Belt will be mounted on Arundel Center, facing Clay Street.
Mr. Harlin, a renowned illustrator, said he was amazed at how easy it has been to work with Ms. Comport.
“She gets it all done without aggressiveness, and she is so humble about her own work,” Mr. Harlin said.
Moving force
Mr. Belt, an illustrator who uses mainly pencil and charcoal, marveled at Ms. Comport’s talents, including the ability to work so quickly in acrylics and pastels, two difficult art materials.
“She is so humble, she is such a supporter of other people’s work, she encourages others,” Mr. Belt said.
Mr. Walsh, co-chairman of ArtWalk and the man Ms. Comport called a mentor, credits Ms. Comport for making ArtWalk a reality.
She has a knack for getting people to work together, he said. For example, she was able to get preservationists to overcome their reluctance about placing large pieces of art on the sides of historic buildings.
“Sally can bring people together and maximize their talents and their interest in a project,” Mr. Walsh said. “She inspires people. Everyone knows she’ll outwork them and do it with a commitment that will never disappoint.”
McShane Glover, chairman of the Annapolis Art in Public Places Commission, a financial backer of ArtWalk, described Ms. Comport as “the most unusual combination of a truly nice person who actually gets things done.”
“Great drive; incredibly talented; gets a lot done; always open to other people’s point of view,” Ms. Glover said, itemizing Ms. Comport’s attributes.
Joanie Surette, Mr. Warren’s business partner who has been active in ArtWalk, said, “There is a generosity about Sally that you don’t often see in artists ... With her, the ego never comes into play — quality, not who gets credit, is what counts.”
Big art
Ms. Comport draws and paints in her home, but a few years ago, she opened a studio on West Street to create large pieces for display indoors and outdoors.
The business she established is called Art at Large Inc.
The Comports have been married for 35 years and have two children, daughters Taylor, 20, and Olivia, 15. They have lived in Annapolis since 1995.
“I decided as my children got older, I was done cranking illustrations off the press,” Ms. Comport said. “I decided I wanted to pay more attention to each piece, and to specialize in large-scale items.”
“My brother, Steve Wern, has a sign company, and I figured out how to use the technology of the sign industry to do my large-scale art.”
The idea for large art pieces began percolating about five years ago, when Ms. Comport and Mr. Walsh met at the gym. Mr. Walsh told her about a rental condominium he owned in Miami that, according to him, didn’t have a view and needed something to distinguish it from all the other units.
The result was a bright, colorful 8-feet-by-10-feet art deco painting of a young woman in a swim suit, checking her tan lines, and a cabana boy standing in the distance. Archival prints of Ms. Comport’s painting may be purchased at The Annapolis Collection Gallery, on West Street, which officially opened last Sunday to carry works by most of the ArtWalk artists.
The Miami painting has weathered the salt spray, wind and sun for three years and still looks brand new, Mr. Walsh said.
About two years ago, Ms. Comport was commissioned to paint a large-scale piece — 111/2 feet by 13 feet — for architect Catherine Purple Cherry, which is exhibited on the side of her building overlooking Rowe Boulevard.
John Menocal, Ms. Comport’s neighbor and the owner of a construction company, has devised an unobtrusive way to mount the works on masonry walls, even when the walls are not smooth, plumb or straight. He described working with Ms. Comport as “a wonderful experience.”
“She is as diametrically opposed to a closed mind as you can be,” Mr. Menocal said. “As long as the project is being (made) as good as it can be, it doesn’t matter to her the source of the idea, because the project is everything.”
The idea for ArtWalk came along as Ms. Comport and Mr. Walsh were thinking about doing an exterior exhibit of large-scale art in Annapolis. Their plan was to mount the pieces on private businesses.
The process
Ms. Comport said she faced considerable skepticism when she suggested mounting paintings and photographs on the exterior walls of buildings in the Annapolis Historic District.
Historic Preservation Commission members worried that the pieces would become frayed and shoddy, and covered with graffiti.
Ms. Comport said the commission would have rejected the project, except the city was looking for a way to celebrate its 300th anniversary and Mr. Warren, the acclaimed photographer who has since died, was an advocate for putting enlarged pieces of art on certain buildings.
In the end, the city’s Art in Public Places Commission funded ArtWalk with a $70,000 grant.
ArtWalk organizers have raised a similar total from private donors, including Severn Bank, Loews Annapolis Hotel, Merrill Lynch Annapolis Office and Homestead Gardens.
The process of producing high quality enlargements that can weather the elements is expensive and time-consuming, Ms. Comport said.
The process starts by photographing a painting or drawing with high resolution cameras. They are photographed in pieces to accommodate the smaller sizes printers can produce.
The Sy Mohr painting for ArtWalk, for example, consisted of 15 separate paintings combined in a collage.
Ms. Comport photographed the Mohr work in four sections, and the painting of Anne Catharine Green was shot in two parts.
In each case, the parts had to match precisely in terms of magnification, color and clarity.
To produce the art, Ms. Comport would drive out to her brother’s place. Steve Wern’s, her brother, is the sign maker in Ohio.
They would print proof after proof, until they got it right.
“It took 15 hours to color-proof Sy Mohr’s piece,” Ms. Comport said. “We just printed and moved the setting, printed and moved the setting, printed and moved the setting, until we got it right”
Ms. Comport said she and her brother sometimes would get so exhausted enlarging paintings, they would stretch out on his shop floor and take a nap.
Much of the difficulty in enlarging paintings comes during the lamination process, because laminating generally changes a painting’s colors, she said. To print the color gray, the copy must be run in magenta.
Also, not only must separate panels of enlarged pieces line up perfectly, but a strip about 2 inches wide must be made that matches the two panels’ edges exactly, so that it can be applied as seam tape, Ms. Comport said The final step consists of mounting frames on old buildings, which generally have surface irregularities.
“They not only have to match horizontally and vertically,” Ms. Comport said of the panels, “they also have to match in depth, so they don’t bow out forward and backward.”
While most people might see these obstacles as aggravations, Ms. Comport sees them as challenges.
She remains determined to put art in public places for everyone to see.
The rewards for an artist can come from unexpected places, Ms. Comport said. One morning a homeless man on a bicycle stopped to watch the installation of the Marion Warren pieces in the parking alcove on West Street. The man had an article from The Capital under his arm, which dealt with the exhibit. He said he just had to come and see the real thing.
It took nearly a week to install the six pieces, and the morning after the project was completed, a street sweeper stopped to talk with Ms. Comport.
“This parking lot here was a place where people threw their trash,” the man had said. “And now, it is something special,” he told Ms. Comport. “You know what, it is kind of like a Beauty and the Beast thing — the art makes the old walls look good, and the old walls make the art look better. You can tell someone, people get it.”
Ms. Comport, the little engine that indeed can get things done, gets a little misty-eyed when she talks about that street sweeper.
Published Sept. 22, 2007, The Capital, Annapolis, Md.
Copyright © 2007 The Capital, Annapolis, Md.
