Newburgh Art Supply is located in this historic building at 5 Grand Street. Photo by Michael Gabor.
By Nancy Peckenham
The Newburgh Art Supply store has found a new home, where owners Michael Gabor and Gerardo Castro are combining their passions for saving Newburgh’s historic charm with offering the finest art supplies in the area.
The new store sits on the ground floor of a mid-19th century brick townhouse on Grand Street in Newburgh, just a stone throw’s from General George Washington’s Headquarters Historic Site. With two aisles filled with paint brushes, pigments, papers, glues and more, it is a delight for artists who work in any medium to check out the supplies that Gabor and Castro have carefully researched and stocked in the store.
Co-owner Michael Gabor inside the Newburgh Art Supply store.
During a recent visit, Gabor described his search for high-quality items that are very hard to find. His pastels, he says, are the best quality in the world and can be used with a unique pastel fixative he stocks that not only preserves the color but is non-toxic as well. ”We found that there are not many eco-friendly art supply stores,” Gabor said, “but we keep growing our collection of high quality, environmentally friendly supplies.”
Paints made from vegetable, spices and fruit are great for children and a almond-based Italian paste is a pleasure for anyone to work with.
Co-owner Gerardo Castro puts finishing touches on his mural, Arte et Labore.
Gabor and his partner, Gerardo Castro, have turned one room in the historic house to what they called a “demonstration room” where some of the products they sell are put to creative expression. In late December, a month after they moved the store into the Grand Street location from its former space on Liberty Street, Castro was painting a fine art mural he calls Arte et Labore using only special graphite and Flemish white oil paints.
It is worth a visit to the store just to see the eight-foot tall mural and to admire the renovation of the building. It was owned by St. Patrick’s parish for 100 years, during which time it served as an orphan asylum, girls academy and convent and vestiges of the fine interior maintained by the church can still be found. The tin ceilings, mantels and other features managed to survive more than 30 years of hard use after it was turned into a six-family apartment house in the 1970s, but it took months of hard work, tearing down walls and restoring floors, by Gabor and Castro before it appears as elegant as it is today.
Newburgh artifacts and souvenirs are on display and for sale in the Palatine Shop.
A second shop adjacent to the art supply store holds a roomful of Newburgh artifacts and souvenirs that Gabor has collected and created in his passion to promote everything Newburgh. A collection of 100 historic postcards, re-issued to mark the Hudson-Fulton Quadricentennial in 2009, blankets, bags and pottery produced in Newburgh, and perhaps the most extensive collection of books written by AJ Downing, who designed Downing Park, are just some of the items on display in the Palatine Shop. Gabor also offers books by local authors, t-shirts and greeting cards and Cds by local artists and musicians.
Gabor says that many of the customers at the art supply store come from throughout the area, drawn by the unique quality of the art supplies. With his passion for the city evident (he is a fixture at city council meetings where he often speaks out against actions he believes are wrong), Gabor says that he hopes that visitors will be engaged by the beauty he finds in historic Newburgh and want to return again and again.
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