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Ethan Boisvert's painting "Spicy City" at City Hall, Hartford, CT (Daren K. Boisvert photo)

In the eighties I made many visits to Hartford’s Municipal Building, or City Hall, and grew to love the exterior and interior magnificence of the grand three-story building. Its architecture is styled after the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and it was perfectly scaled for the site it would occupy when it opened in 1915. Downtown Hartford is small. This building possesses the majesty of the form and materials, yet, like the city’s downtown area, it presents itself in a compact kind of way, opening to passers-by and visitors like a Fabergé egg.

Now the final piece has been added to this glass, granite, brass, and atriumed egg with the interior installation of artist, Ethan Boisvert’s monumental painting of downtown Hartford, Spicy City. The painting ribbons by iconic monuments and places of the little city — the State Capitol Building with its gold-leafed dome; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, oldest public museum in the United States; the Samuel Colt Building; the Phoenix Insurance Company’s  “boat” building; the Soldier’s Arch; even whimsical sketches of cars here and there — with such boisterous, comic love of color, line and shape that the entire scene comes alive, bustling, jostling, humming. The municipal grey insurance city, like a geode cracked open, spills out its vivid carmine, turquoise, amethyst, sapphire, topaz jewels. This is just what Hartford and its Municipal Building needed — not just another decorative splash of color but real art made from the inside out somatic imagination of a talented artist with a draftsman’s knowledge and ability to draw, and an intimate, sense for and knowledge of color and scale. And, Ethan Boisvert is Hartford’s own. If the City has not yet purchased the painting, I think it’s time, to recognize the synergy between this work of art and the symbol of the city it uplifts. That’s it – it uplifts us. ~ yours truly, df

Boisvert’s Spicy City will be on view at City Hall for a month and there will be an opening on First Thursday, November 3,  from 6 to 8 p.m. when CONNetic Dance will perform a short preview for this season’s “Nutcracker Suite & Spicy.”