SCITUATE – For Bart Blumberg, finding a third career after he retired from teaching at age 58 came naturally.

The Hull resident turned to doing more of what he already enjoyed the most in his free time: looking at things around him and capturing images he hoped would also speak to others.

“I’m very observant of my surroundings and am attracted to beauty in nature and architecture,” Blumberg, now 70, says.

He currently has 23 photographs of the full moon rising over Scituate and Hull on display at the Scituate Senior Center.

This theme is one of his favorites: each month brings a new opportunity to look for the “fleeting magical lighting” he finds in a rising moon.

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He even has a phone app that shows him the different angles the moon will come up on the South Shore. The color of the rising moon rapidly changes from pink, rose, orange and gold to silver in the first half hour. He wants to be there throughout.

“It can be a flash to catch a particular color, as the color changes about every five minutes,” he says.

Blumberg is part of a growing presence of senior artists in public places on the South Shore, including libraries, town halls, art associations and now, senior centers.

‘Art is for everybody’ in public places

“Art is for everybody,” Blumberg says. “From children on up. And art also keeps you young and busy. I have been impressed with the number of artists who are older than me I have met on the South Shore.”

Artists on display, art classes and art appreciation programs are being included in more senior centers, according to Linda Hayes Kelley, director of the Scituate Council on Aging.

“It is a newer and very welcome trend and has served us well here for many reasons,” Hayes Kelley said.

Seniors are ‘thirsty to learn’ and express themselves in art

The Scituate senior center is unusual in having its own gallery space dedicated to the visual arts. The Joanne Vignoni Papandrea Gallery is named in memory of the late artist, a gifted teacher who was well-known for her still-life and landscape paintings.

Accomplished in many areas, Papandrea enjoyed teaching seniors because “they are so thirsty to learn.” She fostered a wide network of artists and organized sales and exhibits to raise money for Scituate’s new senior center.

After Papandrea died in May 2020, Hayes Kelley formed a visual arts committee to help create a space in the new senior center building for a gallery. The goal has been to present a variety of art forms and styles, foster an appreciation of the arts, and invite thoughtful reflection.

The artwork and the gallery has also drawn more interest to the senior center and given older artists more visibility in the wider South Shore community.

In addition to the gallery on the walls in a main hallway, the senior center visitor will find watercolors, oils, drawings, and photographs in classrooms, other hallways and the rest rooms.

Many senior centers offer classes in different arts and crafts. In Duxbury, the senior center has an ongoing Art is for Everyone program, funded by a grant from the Grafton Foundation. The current newsletter has a call-out to all artists that art kits are available for people to use at home.

How Ted Williams hit the seat in the bleachers that became Ted’s Red Seat

Bart Blumberg has been a part of the growing opportunities for artists in public spaces for the past decade. He had not taken that many photographs when he retired in 2012, after 20 years teaching fifth grade at the South River School in Marshfield. His first career was in health care policy. However, he had always experienced the world around him in a visual way. He shot 35 mm slides as a teenager and had worked with a digital camera as an adult.

Once retired, he was freer to travel around, always having a camera. One day in 2012, he was on a tour at Fenway Park when someone asked about a single seat painted red in the deep right field bleachers. There was a story. Slugger Ted Williams hit the longest home run, a reported 502 feet, in Fenway Park game history on June 9, 1946, when the ball traveled to the right field bleachers and hit a man watching the game. The seat was painted red in 1984.

Blumberg kept looking at the red seat and took photos from different distances and angles; he later submitted one in a Red Sox contest to celebrate Fenway’s 100th anniversary.

His was one of three winning photos selected in the contest; it also hung in the West Wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for three months. It was an auspicious beginning to what has become a very fulfilling third career.

In February 2020, just before the pandemic took hold, Blumberg also had a photograph showing Graves Light and Boston Light in Boston Harbor in an exhibit at the South Shore Natural Science Center in Norwell. For retired Whitman teacher Jim Spinale, of Plymouth, it sparked fond memories of his father.

He quickly became active with Hull Artists and has been president of the board of directors since 2017.

In an artist’s statement, Blumberg speaks of “making the ordinary extraordinary.”

Finding ‘Wow! moments’ in everyday life around him

“I often try to capture a “wow!” moment of beauty, an emotionally evocative connection with people, or a unique perspective of a structure,” he says. ‘I want the viewer to reflect on a time they, too, experienced something similar or to create a new perception.”

He has lived in Hull for some 20 years, close to “the ever-changing land and seascape to inspire me. “

“Over the past decade, I’ve gone from ‘I take pictures,’ to ‘I’m a photographer’” to ‘I’m an artist and photography is my medium.’”

His 23 photographs of the full moon rising will be on display through March.

Reach Sue Scheible at [email protected].