Ball & Socket Welcomes A Sweet Visual Addition

Peter Brown Photos. 

Maybe it’s the pileated woodpecker, its long, sharp beak framing a gem-colored ice cream sundae, that draws a person closer. Or the tufted titmouse and black-capped chickadee, looking out over a river of chocolate chunks, maraschino cherries, and thick, sweet vanilla cream. Maybe it's Rocco the Racoon in the background, slinking towards this sugar-laced, psychedelic landscape with a hunger in his small, beady eyes.

The animals are all characters in Ice Cream Castles In The Air, a new mural from artists Don Carter (a.k.a Edgar Allan Slothman) and Dora Dylanne Reyes that now graces the side of Ball & Socket Arts, located just off the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail at 493 W Main St. in Cheshire. In May, the two unveiled the mural to delight at a community block party celebrating both the space, and the arrival of spring after a very long winter. It will remain there through the fall.

An extension of Carter and Reyes’ ongoing series Birds & Desserts, it is now a constant companion to Ball & Socket’s rotating gallery of shows, and the beloved ice cream shop Sweet Claude’s right next door. That cluster of buildings is also home to Artsplace Cheshire, an art school that receives financial support from the town and has taught hundreds of artists, from young people just starting out to adults getting back into their craft.

“Our work has really been evolving … in this fantasy landscape, we really created this world,” Carter said in a recent phone call. “As our work just keeps evolving, it's gonna be more and more like this.”

The work, in some ways, has been a lifetime or lifetimes in the making, although the whimsical collaboration behind it happened only in the last few years. When Carter was a young boy growing up in Newington, his grandfather gifted him a book of John James Audubon’s bird prints, of which there are hundreds of images.

The dynamic duo at an unveiling last month. John McDonald Photo.

For the artist, then just four or five years old, it was love at first sight: Carter began drawing birds “all the time,” the graceful, winged creatures unwilling to fly from his mind. They populated the pages of his sketchbooks, rendered with increasing skill and detail the older he got. When he sat on the yearbook committee in high school, they became part of the art inside the yearbook.

Even as he headed to the now-defunct Paier College of Art, and then into the professional art world, birds remained close to his heart. He dreamed of the majestic creatures in flight while illustrating children’s books like Wake Up, House!, Get To Work Trucks and Heaven’s All-Star Band. He thought about birds while making animations for Disney come alive. He put them on the back burner as he became a dynamo in the advertising world (he has been a creative director at Adams & Knight for two decades), with a fondness that remained strong even as he worked on other projects.

And then, 14 years ago, he was able to return to his first love. He came back to Audubon’s Birds of America, and began to think about how to make them “very modern,” with a broad, sometimes-funky and saturated color palette and a sharp digital design, separate from Audubon’s initial creations and yet fully in conversation with them too. “I’m just playing around with them,” he said.

He didn’t know it yet, but a soon-to-be collaborator lived just a few doors away. At the time, Reyes was working in the culinary arts, after years doing videography work for both news stations and personal events like weddings. As a self-taught chef, her forte was and is baking—so much so that she was running a catering business before the Covid-19 pandemic. Roughly six years ago, she also began to paint with watercolors, a creative impulse that was initially simply sweet and whimsical.

Then in March 2020, when the world skidded to a halt, “it [painting] was the thing that saved me,” she remembered. Reyes, suddenly hunkered down in her apartment with no catering jobs in sight, started to paint the sweet treats that she was baking. “I was at home painting and baking and painting what I was baking,” and it helped her stay sane.

Peter Brown Photo.

There were many treats along the way: strawberry shortcake with clouds whipped cream and gem-toned, sliced berries, tiered and frosted cakes with buttercream as neat as a pin, s’mores with homemade graham crackers, and ice cream and waffle cones spun out of scratch. Some people opted for sourdough: Reyes went for sugar, butter, and flour, and documented it all in watercolor.

“I would go as deep as I could to make every element,” she remembered, a smile at the edges of her voice. On Friday nights, she had a standing date with herself, during which she made something that she hadn’t baked before. “I liked just experimenting.”

As Covid restrictions began to ease in 2021, Reyes had the good fortune of working with Carter, who she described as a neighbor and a friend, to get her greeting card company Luvfish, which features many of those scrumptious baked designs, off the ground. As he started teaching her about digital design, the two spent time poring over images in Adobe Suite, where he does much of his work reimagining Audubon’s birds.

That collaboration, initially just two friends teaching each other, ultimately led to what Carter now calls the duo’s “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup" moment. One day, Carter was showing Reyes the image of a Florida Cormorant that he was working on. He was about to add a fish to the bird’s beak when Reyes stopped him.

“And she said, ‘Don't give him a fish! Give him a piece of Black Forest cheesecake!’” he remembered with a laugh. Something clicked; the Birds & Desserts series was born. “I was like, ‘That’s it.’ It was strange and wonderful at the same time … there was something magical about it."

In the series, Carter and Reyes both appreciate the inherent silliness and contradiction—birds aren’t supposed to eat desserts—and run wild with it. For both of them, there’s something so charming, so wonderfully weird and surreal about it, that the concept just sticks. So when they heard about a sweet new opportunity in Cheshire, they were all ears.

Initially, it was Jill Fletcher, director of development at Ball & Socket, who invited them to do their first large-scale mural for the organization. The spot made a mouth-watering amount of sense: Ball & Socket shares its main complex with Sweet Claude’s, an ice cream shop that owner Kelly Anne Pearce moved into in 2022 (the shop has been in operation for decades, but only recently made the move).

Pearce, who had worked there as an employee before she was the owner, started sending images of the shop's ice cream to Reyes. Meanwhile, Carter did research on birds native to the area—and wove in requests like Rocco the Racoon, who hangs out in the not-yet-restored button factory, from Ball & Socket Executive Director Ilona Somogyi.

The completed design. Peter Brown Photo. Bottom image courtesy of the artists. 

While Reyes dreamed up fantastical desserts—marbled, gold-kissed scoops of caramel ice cream, sprinkle-rolled sandwiches with thin chocolate wafers, a river of cherries and chocolate chunks, and of course a cookie moon, complete with a bite taken out of it—Carter brought a number of local birds to life. In the finished piece, there is a barred owl, pileated woodpecker, tufted titmouse, black-capped chickadee, red-shouldered hawk, pigeon, chipping sparrow, trio of barn swallows in flight, and a wood duck.

“Well for me, and for both of us, our work has really been evolving from the Audubon images to this fantasy landscape,” Carter said.

When the two had finished the design—it’s printed on vinyl, rather than painted directly onto the wall—he and Reyes did the installation in multiple parts. For the Ball & Socket team, it’s a vibrant way to welcome in summertime at the complex, which sits just off a section of the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail in Cheshire. In addition to a rotating schedule of exhibitions at its gallery, Ball & Socket offers live music each month and Tuesday night writing workshops all summer long. Currently on view is a solo show from the artist Jenny Wu entitled But, rational. 

“It’s this really wonderful, collaborative project,” said Lydia Blaisdell, director of programming at Ball & Socket. “We are always excited to try new things, to celebrate new things. I think the energy on site really shifts when the weather warms up. We see so many new people walking on the trail with their dogs, bicycling on the trail … we pop open the gallery more.”

Reyes called the finished mural “amazing and surreal” (“you wouldn’t know it by looking at this mural, but it's about restraint,” she added with a laugh) while Carter reflected on how emotional the process ultimately was for him. After savoring the unveiling at a block party in May, both said they are interested in similar projects elsewhere in the state (ahem, Ashley’s Ice Cream). While the two live just over the border in Massachusetts, they added, both are excited by the idea of more work in Connecticut.

“This was Dora’s idea. She opened this world,” Carter added. Now that they’re moving forward with the series, “our process is different every time.”