HAVERHILL – Bradford artist Mark Hayden’s studio stands just off his house. Between the two structures is a short, gnarled tree. Below it, ground cover grows in a riot.
He refers to his studio as his mess, but stepping inside it on this day, it’s more a museum than a mess.
Still, it does have a lived-in look, feel and smell. It goes beyond solvents or paint or canvas. History. His history. His history in Haverhill.
Paintings hang and lean high and low. His portraits include people he knows or has known.
They include the surgeon who performed surgeries, four of them, on his back.
Also among the portraits is one of Steve Whiteman.
“He died a couple years ago,” Hayden says. “He was a great musician and a science fiction writer. He used to play and sing with one of my brothers back in like 1972.”
Among the studio’s color-smeared wooden palettes, crinkled paint tubes, clean wispy brushes and sturdy easels are powder horns, books, posters, instruments, snapshots, skulls, handwritten notes, vintage hats and more.
A stuffed spotted owl peers on high above the entry.
Behind it is a poster of an Old West poker game. A barefoot player passes a card between his toes to a co-conspirator under the table — a nod to the “Three Stooges” short in which Curly and Moe do the same.
On second thought, his studio is a book, a tale with lots of characters and chapters.
Start at any item, and a narrative will emerge.
The story will at some point arrive at what led him to art: trauma.
He was a scared young schoolchild standing at the chalkboard and suddenly aware that his chalk drawings were being admired.
He was scared by something he couldn’t talk about for a long time.
He is a Copley master, recognized by the Copley Society of Art in Boston, and has been a professional artist, earning his living from art since 1982.
He is independent-minded and says that he would have a hard time working for someone else. He chafes at being bossed.
He’s a lifelong Haverhill guy with a Western demeanor or appearance.
He brings to mind the kindly movie actor Richard Farnsworth.
Strokes of resilience
A prominent painting in the studio sits in a gold frame resting on an easel at eye level. Under a dark hood, a mysterious woman holds an arresting gaze. It’s a production set piece.
Filmmaker Douglas Guarino hired Hayden to paint the woman for a horror series he’s making.
Hayden has a small role in it, as an artist. In the series, “Granite Witch,” he meets the woman in a Nashua, New Hampshire, speakeasy and paints her portrait.
Guarino knows Hayden from an earlier project.
Six years ago, the filmmaker created a documentary on Hayden, called “Brushed.” It is available to rent or buy on Prime Video.
In the 26-minute film, Hayden tells of how he turned to art to create a persona, a way to protect himself after he was abducted and violently sexually abused as a young child.
Painting was something he could do and pursue, and it allowed him to create an ideal world through the realistic scenes he illustrated.
“I always wanted to paint beautiful, quiet places,” he says. “Paint what I wanted life to be. The people that I paint, I just want to know them for a little while.”
Hayden graduated from Haverhill High School in 1975, then attended Montserrat College of Art in Beverly. He got married in 1982. He and his wife, Margot, a Braille transcriber, have two grown children.
Hayden has been a member of the Greater Haverhill Arts Association since the 1970s and for decades has held a Saturday morning workshop.
It’s every other week, now in the hall at the First Church of Christ on Bradford Common.
Hayden’s home studio holds keepsakes and art devoted to the blues and places he has visited. They include the Mississippi Delta and the West.
A bunch of baseball mitts hang like bananas. Behind the studio was a field of dreams, a backyard pitcher’s mound and home plate where the Hayden boys and their dad played baseball.
In a corner of the studio hangs a pair of leather 8-ounce boxing gloves that once held the fists of Brockton-raised heavyweight undefeated champion of the world Rocky Marciano.
Marciano wore them when he was just starting out in the fight game, in the Amateur Athletic Union ranks 75 years ago. Hayden received them from a former AAU commissioner, Mike Schena.
Incredibly, the leather gloves remain intact, neither cracked nor torn. Hayden didn’t keep them for display. He used them to hit a heavy bag, for fitness and to fend off darkness from his early years.
Also here is an 1882 banjo that once belonged to Marshall Dodge of the “Bert & I” comedy skits.
Hayden never got the hang of playing it. He picked up a smaller instrument without strings.
A handmade leather harmonica satchel in the studio holds Blues Harps tuned to every key.
Finding a new rhythm
About the time Hayden turned 50, he started playing harmonica.
A friend, blues harmonica musician Justin Quinn, taught him to play the instrument, and Hayden taught Quinn to paint.
Quinn would also lend a critical hand to Hayden when he most needed it, a hand that eventually led Hayden on a healing path of reckoning with his past.
Hayden plays music with friends, including retired Haverhill High School history teacher Tom Jordan.
Jordan taught Hayden’s son Connor, who is now a Latin teacher at Haverhill High.
Hayden and Jordan played at Creative Haverhill, a nonprofit arts organization, in downtown in the spring.
Among the people there was artist Jim Tinguely, another longtime member of the Greater Haverhill Arts Association.
He and Hayden have worked together for 45 years.
“We look at each other’s work,” says Tinguely, who was drawing Hayden and Jordan as they played protest songs, including “Do Re Mi” by Woody Guthrie.
“We learn from each other,” Tinguely says.
Hayden played harmonica, and Jordan accompanied himself on acoustic guitar.
The framed art on the wall was Hayden’s.
The portraits include one of his grandson, James, 2, with an expression beyond his years.
Vibrant landscapes and seashore paintings pull together scenes from Haverhill and the region.
Among them are the Basiliere Bridge and Merrimack River in winter, with bufflehead ducks in the foreground, and in summer, seen from farther away.
Hayden’s great sweeping scenes are a pleasure to behold.
Also here is Beckman’s Point, at the end of Seabrook Beach, and Plum Island waves crashing in the surf, and the Hampton River Bridge, which his father helped build after World War II.
In a corner is a painting of a full moon and a church steeple. The moon has a ring of light around it, an aura.
Hayden happened upon the scene and stared closely, trying to memorize it.
He then ran back to his studio to paint it.
His art captures Haverhill life, his place here in the city by the river in all seasons and through the years.