MEANINGFUL MURAL: Wall mural at Country Club Family Restaurant is complete

By Nicole Coleman/colemann@gnnewspaper.com
The Journal-Register

October 19, 2007 12:10 pm

— Patrons of the Country Club Family Restaurant in Medina won’t have to travel far to enjoy panoramic views of northern Greece.
Artist Connie Maines, daughter of Harry and Janet Maines of Lyndonville, spent the past week painstakingly recreating the homeland of the Bitsas family, the restaurant’s owners. The full wall mural contains large Greek columns with scenes from the lush, unspoiled mountainous region.
The columns appear to emerge from the wall itself, giving one the feeling of being in a monastery looking out at the Greek countryside.
“At this point, it’s pure fantasy,” Connie said. She pauses briefly before adding brushstroke around a white cottage she says she would love to live in. “Dad is my general adviser.”
Harry, a former Lyndonville mayor, smiles at his daughter’s remark. Resting at a nearby table, he has been with Connie for six days straight, enjoying the chance to watch her in action. Paint spots on his shirt reveal that he must have gotten too close.
“It’s utterly astounding, the size and the appearance. It’s just like Greece.” said Harry, a woodworker, himself.
In 2003, Connie was commissioned by the Bitsas family to complete two 5-by-8-foot paintings of Bill Bitsas’ childhood home and school, which were mounted on two walls on the restaurant. The family liked them so much they asked Connie to return this year to paint three panoramic murals directly onto the dining room walls.
Connie, who now resides in Hampstead, N.H., will complete the second wall in November. She has yet to decide if she will continue with the troublesome Greek columns or try something different, she said.
“They look like pictures. You can’t even tell the difference,” said Bill’s son, James. “It makes me want to go right now.”
A graduate of Lyndonville High School, Connie went on to Harvard University, where she majored in fine arts. After spending five months traveling in Greece “being a hippie,” she earned a school psychology degree from Boston’s Tufts University and began working with the developmentally disabled. Now that she is retired, she has a part-time business painting portraits.
Connie said the wall mural at the Country Club Family Restaurant is something she has always wanted to do. Her aunt and uncle, Marian and Ken Dack, are regulars at the restaurant, and she knew they would get a kick out of seeing her artwork.
The mural’s beauty is in the details — a man flying a kite, a distant town with a dome-shaped Greek Orthodox church. In one section, the sun appears to shine down on the landscape below.
“It gives (the restaurant) that little something different,” said Bill’s wife, Frances, or “Fanie” in Greek. “It’s a beautiful country.”
Contact reporter Nicole Coleman at 798-1400, ext. 2227.

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