By Olivia DePunte
Karen Rinaldo started her art gallery on Falmouth’s Main Street in 1972, the year before the Falmouth Road Race began. Since then, “I’ve watched the road race grow to the legendary race that it is today,” she said. Over the years she has been commissioned to do many commemorative paintings for memorable, significant moments of the race, including a painting on the life of race founder Tommy Leonard.
“I’ve had the opportunity over the years to watch it,” Rinaldo said. “I have grown an appreciation and understanding of just how beautiful and challenging it is for those thousands of runners.” Not a runner herself, she considers her work to be her own personal road race.
This year, the Falmouth Road Race management team had a specific theme in mind: capturing the spirit of the 50th running of the wheelchair division. “I wanted to create a true energy of what the start line is,” Rinaldo said. “I started on Water Street to check out the space and take photographs. I saw the Tommy Leonard plaque and thought the surrounding part of the image had to incorporate the plaque, and that became the beginning point for the composition.
“One of the things I try to do is bring the viewer into the space of the painting. The first thing you see is the line of wheelchairs at the start point, which makes for a dramatic entry for the viewer that truly represents the energy of the morning.”
This is the first time she has documented every step along the way, working closely with the Falmouth Road Race to chronicle the entire process. Starting from hundreds of tracing papers, Rinaldo spent hours shifting them around on her drawing board to find the most-attractive layout, then transferred the tracings to ink. It took several days to create the lettering for the banner and sponsor names alone. She also penned in the names on the wheelchair racers’ bibs to create a sense of shared history within the race’s milestone.
Rinaldo has saved every last one of those pieces of tracing paper, so the poster can quite literally be traced from the idea’s conception to how it grew over several months to reach its completion, with the finishing touches splashed in vibrant watercolor.
“The mental process is something I treasure so much,” Rinaldo said. “It’s all-encompassing until I complete it, and even then I still care about my work and how it’s interpreted. My hope is that when the runners get a copy they will be proud to have it.”
The final piece is ink and watercolor—made realistic to depict the eager anticipation in the suspension of a moment before the gun sounds and the wheelchair race starts with a bang. The poster will be gifted to each of the thousand runners in their race day bag, her work a loving testament to the process and dedication in the last five decades of wheelchair racing.
“You have to respect the process,” Rinaldo said. “From illumination to culmination of an idea, and everything in between, can hold its own deliberation and concentration. Once I get it to the point of that ‘aha moment’ it’s the most exhilarating feeling. It’s my own personal road race.”