The life's blood of Provincetown

Plein-air artist Jerome Greene on creating his "Musicians, Murals and Mentors" mural

Jerome Greene, Musicians, Muses, and Mentors. Trap Shed at MacMillan Pier, Provincetown Public Art Summer 2025. All photos courtesy the artist.

Jerome Greene chronicles and captures beauty and characters in the real world, translating the scenes around Provincetown onto paper and canvas. As an artist and director of facilities at the Fine Arts Work Center, he’s part of the robust cultural circulatory system that pumps through the town’s veins. So it makes sense that the Provincetown Public Art Foundation would invite him to paint one of its trap shed murals this summer. If you’re in town this week, there’s an opening at 6pm on Thursday, August 14, in the gazebo at the end of MacMillan Wharf.

The artist is also a musician, who plays out with the local band the Broke Brothers. His mural on MacMillan Pier, Musicians, Muses, and Mentors pays tribute to his two passions, and the family of artists and musicians he has known in town since he moved there in 2007.

Making a mural entailed learning some new skills and working with new materials, like house paint, as he writes below. The work has a conceptual twist that steps beyond his usual painterly representations.

Jerome began with a painting of Captain Jack’s Wharf. Already we’re entering something of a wormhole: A plein-air artist who works out on the piers brings his vision of one wharf to another. Then he added large renderings of sketches he has made of Provincetown musicians. The wharf scene has those potent, tonic tones typical of the Outer Cape, while black-and white pages from his sketchpad appear to flit across the surface, here right now but soon lost to the wind, and to time.

Jerome writes: