Mark Dube started a Brunswick gallery to sell art and handmade crafts after tiring of life as a corporate employee, which he said stifled his need and ability to create.
Following the death of a close friend in 2005 and his father, as well, a few years later, the 47-year-old Topsham native gave up working for other people.
In April, he started a gallery where he could sell arts and craft products created by him and his friends.
NAMED AFTER proprietor Mark Dube’s close friend, Gwen’s Attic is located at 52 Maine St. in Brunswick, above the Looking Glass salon. The space formerly existed as a dentist’s office and yoga studio.
WOODEN TOY TRUCKS and tractors, handmade by his uncle, are some of Mark Dube’s favorite items. “I love that they’re made of wood,” Dube said. “I hate that we live in such a disposable culture now, when actual craftsmanship used to mean something.”
“It hasn’t gotten horrible yet,” he says, and punctuates it with a wide smile.
‘Real’ jobs
Having worked many jobs, including several within the clothing and garment design industry, Dube has discovered that he really likes working for himself.
For one thing, he only has himself to blame or credit.
Dube is the kind of guy who’d rather leave the television silent and dark, marooned in a corner and ignored.
“That’s not the kind of thing you can say much when you work for a television company,” he said. “But it got to the point where I was just done with the corporate thing. I’m a creative person, I hang around with creative people, and we all need to create.”
He draws on a wide and deep circle of friends and family for his inventory:
Uncle David Dube carves toy trucks and tractors out of wood. His cousin, Lori Cail — David’s daughter — makes bags and quilts.
“She’s one of the most prolific seamstresses I’ve ever known,” Mark Dube said.
Durham odd-jobber Ralph Avery fabricates roses out of copper, and his wife Margie bakes jams and jellies.
Additionally, work from several area photographers, including Elizabeth Cradock and Marianne Van Baars, hangs on the wall for sale. Not far away, handmade dolls built by Jean Toppi and books handbound by Beth Roberge rest in racks or lean on a mantlepiece, waiting for the right person to come and take them home.
Diane Belanger, another of Dube’s “contributing artists,” also works at the shop, replacing Dube when he has to be elsewhere.
Inspiration, avocation
Pfanku, the shop’s namesake, died in 2005 from the ravaging effects of breast cancer.
Her picture hangs at the top of the stairway leading to the showroom. She and Dube would get together and design or create things, whether clothing or furnishings — often from the piles left out on Portland’s city streets the night before the monthly “big trash item” pickup days.
“We had this need to repurpose or recycle or restore things,” Dube said. “We were always looking for old things that we could jazz up, either give it new life or turn it into something totally new and different.”
An example of the artists’ need to recreate stands underneath the cash register, near the back wall. It’s a vintage steamer trunk, all clean tweed and gleaming brass corner pieces — except that it’s been sawn in half lengthwise and stood on end to form a stand-up work desk.
Another repurposed trash item is a bench with a tall back, refinished and painted to become a display shelf. That was Dube’s own doing, too.
“We always worked well together,” Dube said of Pfanku. “You put two creative people in a room and that’s what happens.
“You hear creative people talk about what they like to do — and then you hear them talk about their ‘real’ jobs, and they say it with such disdain,” he said. “I know what all these people are doing right now, I know what their ‘real’ jobs are, and I want to be able to give them a chance to exercise their creativity.”
He credits Pfanku with instilling in him the belief that such a shop and gallery could work.
It just took a little longer to materialize than she had left.
“We’d thought about doing it several times before, but there was always that one variable left that would keep it from working out,” Dube said. “But I never gave up on the idea. This time, when it happened, it all happened really quickly. The space came open in February and we opened April 19.
“Now, she’s here. I can feel it.”
The space, too, is another example of Dube’s life in alignment.
He is surrounded by handmade crafts and objets d’art — many of his own creation — in a second-floor, pastel-colored shop space that is warm and airy. With the windows open, the sounds of Maine Street’s daily bustle filter up from below.
It’s a lifetime away from his childhood memories of the same space when it used to be his dentist’s office.
So deeply buried were the bad memories that he didn’t even know it was the same office until a family member pointed it out to him.
“Then I was like, ‘Oh, yeah!’” Dube said recently. “I remember that was the waiting area and there was a table right there,” he said, pointing to the northwest corner of the room, “and that’s where the Highlights magazines were, and I just loved to read them,” he explained.
Immediately prior to becoming Gwen’s Attic, the space had been a yoga studio.
Dube spent a couple of weeks on a ladder, rolling the walls with raspberry moussecolored paint and the stairway and ceiling a bright, limegreen. Floral vines are stenciled and festive, decorative lights are strung throughout.
“I grew up here, and I feel privileged to be part of the downtown community,” he said. “It’s an honor to help other (artists) get their stuff out there.”
jtleonard@timesrecord.com
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