Dorchester Reporter
March 7, 2002

Artists Swap Ideas at 'Salon' in Savin Hill
by Kellyanne Mahoney

Four years ago George MacMasters set out on a "lonely enterprise." The Dorchester native was getting older-"it was either start writing or forget about it," he said.

MacMasters is currently taking classes at Harvard University and is working on a short story about a young neighborhood man who gets caught up in drug abuse and violence.

Saturday night he will read from his work at the Pseudo Salon, a gathering of local artists who meet about twice a year to showcase their work.

MacMasters says he finds comfort in these meetings. "Sometimes it's hard to keep going. Most of the time you work alone. You know recognition is a long way off. [The Pseudo Salon] reminds me I'm not by myself-and I'm not crazy!"

James Hobin, the Savin Hill artist who hosted the first of these gatherings at his Pearl Street studio in 1995, can list many others like Mac Masters who toil away mostly unnoticed.

"[In Dorchester] there are a few pockets of artists, they work quietly," Hobin says. "They don't make a big splash."

Many artists have moved here from other parts of Boston in recent years because they can't afford studio space elsewhere. Most must work another job to get by.

"I know a life guard, a museum guard, a house painter, a hair stylist, a carpenter," Hobin says.

"We don't have to go to Newbury Street to see great art. It's right in our backyards."

He mentions Aidan Parkinson, a playwright who lives in Savin Hill, and Fields Corner artist Randolph Grosvenor, a native of Barbados. Grosvenor, he says, works with discarded objects, "things that peel off the edges of our lives."

Poet Peter Frawley Scarbo writes in Dorchester vernacular, utilizing "certain inflections and phrases" he overhears in conversation. He calls it Boston City Music.

Another local artist Hobin talks about is MacMasters. But "he's probably better-known for swimming the English Channel," he says.

It is a feat that MacMasters completed five years ago.

"Yeah, I was lucky to get across that," Mac Masters says of the accomplishment. As a swim teacher at Harvard, he has traveled with his team to Central Asia and Egypt, and has swum in the Caspian Sea and the Nile. Still, he sets much of his fiction in and around Dorchester, and plays off current events that plague the neighborhood. He also likes to write about gangsters and the FBI.

"I wouldn't exactly describe my stories as upbeat," he says.

MacMasters calls himself an "amateur writer." He cites as his favorite authors Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Joyce Carol Oates and "Hemingway, of course." He says Harvard is a "motivating place to be."

He met Hobin ten years ago, when he lived in Savin Hill and coached the University of Massachusetts Boston swim team. He now lives in the Ashmont area, near where he grew up. He began his career as a lifeguard at Tenean and Savin Hill beaches.

Both Hobin and MacMasters say that Dorchester's unique geographic location, the richness of an urban setting coupled with the natural beauty of the Neponset River and the ocean, keeps them inspired.

"It's a living mix. You can't help but get some creative ideas," Mac Masters says. "This is where I started."

Hobin, whom MacMasters calls the "hub of Dorchester art," says that in order to relate to a Dorchester audience "all [you] need to do is express yourself as honestly as you can."

Hobin says he is excited that this regular gathering, which started out as just a few friends coming to his place, is "staying alive and growing." The last Pseudo Salon drew 70 people.

"It's evolved into a show in more of a theatrical sense, with chairs lined up." This time around it will take place downstairs at C.F. Donovan's on Savin Hill Avenue, across the street from Hobin's well-known mural painted on the sidewall of McKenna's Café, which features Native Americans indigenous to this area tending to their daily affairs, with a backdrop of the harbor islands tapering off in the distance.

Inside the Pseudo Salon there will be paintings hung. Poets and other writers will read. There will be dancers, musicians and films. Mac Masters' brother Tim will play the bagpipes.

It remains a casual affair. Hobin says to "show up a little early and have a drink." Admission is free. "We normally pass the hat, to cover costs for mailings, but no one's gonna get turned away."