Our Hometown
Berlin | Andre Belanger
Clip | 6m 41sVideo has Closed Captions
Andre speaks to us about growing up in Berlin.
Andre speaks to us about growing up in Berlin, surrounded by art & music, and how much this mill town valued those things.
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Our Hometown is a local public television program presented by NHPBS
Our Hometown
Berlin | Andre Belanger
Clip | 6m 41sVideo has Closed Captions
Andre speaks to us about growing up in Berlin, surrounded by art & music, and how much this mill town valued those things.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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you know, I know that you're an artist.
I know you're a working artist.
You've been here a long time.
Are you a native of Berlin?
Yes, I am.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're real good?
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is my hometown.
I grew up here surrounded with the arts.
Really?
You know, in a time, I guess.
I know I was a very fortunate young child in.
In a community that really relished the arts.
We looked at it, looked upon people who made art with great respect and it was we were surrounded with music throughout the community, in visual arts and and a whole bunch of really cool things.
Like in my family, for example, my mum painted.
She was a painter, not a professional painter, but she loved to paint and she was pretty darn good at it.
And she, like most of the people in the sixties and I'm sure late fifties, but in the sixties and perhaps later, But from my recollection, of course, she painted with the local man who did painting lessons for all the women in town and some men in town who would get together and paint in the evenings and and she was good at it.
My dad painted as well, and yet when he was a kid, he aspired to be an artist.
Of course, he went When he went off to war, he could hurt pretty badly.
this is how I grew up surrounded with the arts.
There was always music around.
My dad was instrumental in forming a barbershop chorus and he was a bass and a quartet.
And I heard that sound.
I'd go to sleep with that sound, those minor chords in my head.
And he was also instrumental in forming a drum and bugle corps.
So with that marching, that cadence that that rhythm and and he was a drummer before he got hurt the war.
And, and he taught a good portion of the people who drummed how to drum.
So there was music in our lives and that were it was visual arts in my in our lives.
And and I was apprenticed to the local wood carver Bob Hughes at a young age.
I carved wood with him for a long time, started about 1415, somewhere in there.
And then I met Jeanne Bartoli at the White Mountains Center for the Arts and Jefferson, and a car stolen with Jean went to NH for a while and studied sculpture there and cast bronze and continued my desire to make art.
Got involved in a TV program when I was there with WTNH, the Francophile.
Yeah, and it was a an award winning program and I was the puppeteer.
Louis Alouette came back to Berlin, carved signs as a wood signs with gold leaf and as a career still kept up with sculpture and painting and and went through life making reliefs, sculptures really has his signage.
And now years have gone by and I finally hung up my street advertising tools.
And now I've finally, finally got this place in life.
I have decided to dedicate my energies back to making fine art, sculpture and painting I'm interested in how we what we have here is a mill town.
Yes, yes, yes.
We're supported by the mills.
Everyone thinks connected to the mills, and yet it is also a town full of music and full of art.
Yeah.
In this city, this place has nourished you as an artist, I think.
Yes.
yeah.
Talk about how that.
I know it's really hard to talk about, but know you're still here, You're still creating art.
You don't want to go anywhere else.
Yeah.
You're not going to New York City to be inspired.
It's right here.
how does how does a community like this, as you ask me, how does a community that's known as a timber community is a mill town?
You know, at the turn of the last century, industrial, a mill town north, an artist or nurse, a person to pursue the arts issue and endorsed me, particularly as as a person to love the arts.
Well, everywhere I go in Berlin, I look into the eyes of the people whom I love.
And they are I see.
I see the heart of the people.
And I suppose I could do that in other communities.
But this that I would have to bust down the walls, as they say, to make new relationships and that's an awful lot of energy to find the soul of a new person.
When I know people and I love them, I have to get back to my family.
I have to get back to the roots in my family, where my folks were great supporters of my following art.
I mean, the kids in my neighborhood, we all were.
I was a regular kid, no question about that.
But I also had the opportunity to go into my mom's room where she painted with oil paint.
And I could paint and I could build things that were artsy fartsy with my dad.
And my grandfather was very hands on kind of thing.
And I barely knew him.
but I was exposed to stuff.
And then I followed the arts as a young man, and I carved wood and stone as I shared with you with Hughes and Bartoli.
I went to school to study art at new and age.
I was in a television program, which is an artsy thing.
I acted as a puppeteer and I built the puppet.
So it was a hands on kind of thing.
I my career.
How did I follow it?
I just was true to the sort of myself.
So I'd look into my mirror and I would find that that's what I loved, that's what I loved.
And
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