Awesome Gloucester puts large-scale public art on walls around Cape Ann, working with the artists Josh Falk and Dana Woulfe, and this is for the next one.

We just finished the tenth. Josh and Dana reproduced Winslow Homer's "The Fog Warning" at enormous scale on the side of Gloucester Rental Center on Maplewood Avenue. Homer sketched the Gloucester fishing fleet in charcoal in the summer of 1884, working aboard the schooners themselves, and those drawings became the painting: a fisherman alone in a dory with his halibut, the fog coming in, his schooner far off on the horizon, only his own strength to get him home. A hundred and forty-two years later he is back in Gloucester, big enough to see from down the street.

What it took to get him there is the part worth telling. Pat and Taylor at Gloucester Rental Center gave us the wall, then loaned us the equipment to reach it and helped pay for the work besides, which is about three more yeses than anyone thinks to ask for. Cape Ann Savings Bank and the Gloucester Rotary Club helped fund it, and every trustee put in cash with several putting in extra. Homer painted a man doing the work on his own, and it took most of a town to put him on that wall.

Ten murals now stand in Gloucester and Rockport because ten times over people said yes to the wall, yes to the money, yes to the work, and yes to the idea that something beautiful ought to be where everybody can see it.