By Thomas Breen
Katro Storm sat on a scaffold 15 feet high outside of Lincoln-Bassett School Monday morning as he painted the nose of a friend, mentor, and fellow New Haven artist who taught him that “it was OK to have country roots” — and that it’s important to paint regular people, and not just celebrities.
“He convinced me to paint my own story,” Storm said about the late Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Winfred Rembert, who lived on Newhall Street and carved leather masterpieces of his life in the Jim Crow South that earned national renown.
Storm is currently working on a double-portrait mural of Rembert and his beloved wife Patsy on the Bassett Street side of the Newhallville public school.
Storm, a 58-year-old local painter, said he started working on the mural on July 1. If the weather holds — that is, if the rain stays away and if it doesn’t get so hot that his paint dries in the sun — he hopes to finish in two weeks.
This mural, just like the one Storm recently finished at Ferry Street and Grand Avenue in Fair Haven, is supported by the local public-art nonprofit Site Projects. Storm is working with Winfred and Patsy’s son Mitchell Rembert as well as Cecil Boyce to make this new mural a reality.
Storm described Winfred as a “good friend.” He recalled sitting on the Remberts’ front porch and listening to Winfred tell story after story about his life growing up in the Jim Crow South, making his way north, and becoming an artist.
Storm said his own family hails from Whiteville, North Carolina. “My family had a tobacco farm and a cotton farm,” he said — an inspiration for a cotton-focused art show he once put on called “Will It Grow In Sharon?” Storm cited Rembert’s leather-work depictions of Southern cotton picking as some of his favorite works by the late Newhallville artist.
Overall, Rembert’s depictions of what it was like to a Black man in Georgia resonate with Storm. “I knew about juke joints” from his own family’s time in the South, Storm said. “I identify with that lifestyle.”
Storm said he likes to start work in the morning — sometimes as early as 5:30 a.m. — on the Winfred-Patsy mural. It’s not too hot then, he said, and the light is clear. He sometimes works until it gets dark.
He described his goal of painting “a lovely Black couple” in addition to honoring a friend on the side of Lincoln-Bassett. Rembert didn’t get to have much of a childhood in Georgia, Storm noted, so there’s something particularly poignant about his mural looking out over an elementary school playground.
Storm is working with just three colors — grey, white, and black outdoor acrylic paint — to make this mural. “We kept it simple,” he said.
He also noted that, when he works so close up on such a large mural, individual attributes of the painting can feel quite abstract. He pointed to a shadow and a curve of Rembert’s nose as resembling a dragon rearing its long neck and head. Storm said he climbs up and down the scaffolding 20 times a day to check his work from sidewalk level to make sure it’s coming out alright.
“It’s definitely an honor,” he said about painting the Remberts.
Storm said that Rembert’s work shows him how to translate a life filled with challenges into beautiful art. When his own life is less than stable, Storm said, painting still “makes me feel good. It’s my purpose.”
