REVERE — When Denise Boucher found a stack of old newspapers at a flea market four years ago, she was simply interested in the stories they contained.
“There were these crazy articles about gangsters and a police chief being indicted,” Boucher said. “It was such a different world than we live in now.”
Inspired by the stories about a long-ago Revere, Boucher decided to make a collage of the newspapers and then paint over them to create pieces of art about her hometown, which she was then able to sell “instantly.”
Encouraged by the results, Boucher started up her business, Pour Your Art Out. She has now created similar pieces of art for towns around the North Shore from newspapers, postcards and advertisements she finds at flea markets, such as Todd’s Farm in Rowley and Mills 58 in Peabody, and on eBay. She sells original pieces and prints of her creations, which also show local sports teams and classic New England products like Marshmallow Fluff and Moxie.
“I try to keep everything New England,” Boucher said. “I want people to remember things from back in the day.”
For pieces where she already has a lot of material to work with, it can take her two days to finish a collage. For pieces where she still needs to collect components, it can take much longer, and she has begun getting requests for custom pieces about towns that are farther away, including in California and Hawaii.
Although Boucher works two other jobs, at Raytheon and an HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) consulting company, she uses her free time to work on her business. The COVID-19 pandemic has given her extra time to create her art, which she sells at craft fairs, and recently opened an Etsy store, which she says has been very successful. Her next in-person sale will be a pop-up at Mills 58 on February 20.
Boucher said she has always been attracted to old pictures, newspapers and signs. One of her favorite parts of running the business is learning a lot about the area by reading the old articles. For example, she recently created a piece for the virtual 2020 Somerville Fluff Festival from old images of the Flufferettes, a 1930s girl group inspired by the marshmallow spread.
“This is my home, and there’s so much I didn’t know,” she said. “Every time I do a new town, I learn all these new things.”
Some of her pieces are more personal, too. She has one collage hanging in her home with images of Revere, including a 1930s photograph of her grandmother standing on Revere Beach and a 1920s picture of her great-grandfather in his car at the same place.
“It’s just a neat one, just putting all that together,” Boucher said. “If you go down to Revere Beach now you can see how it’s changed.”
Tréa Lavery can be reached at [email protected].
