By Tania Phillips
Retired Stanthorpe teacher Franco Arcidiacono knew he was never going to be one of those people who put his feet up when he retired.
Instead, the former History, Geography and Italian teacher is now spending his days (when not working with wife Morwenna on various local committees and organisations) painting. And he is really making his mark on the town he has called home since the mid-70s.
Sicilian-born Franco, the man who introduced Italian to Stanthorpe high, has swapped chalk and white boards for paints, brushes and pastels – creating both on canvas and on walls around the region and indeed in other regions of Australia. His latest work – a beautiful black and white mural (his preferred colour scheme) graces the wall of Em’s Café and he’s about to start a new project out at one of the local State Schools.
“I took up painting more seriously once I retired – I’ve been retired now for about nine years,” he said.
“When I was teaching at Stanthorpe High – I spent about 34 years teaching their – I saw so many of my colleagues who sort of felt at a continuous lose end when they retired and didn’t know what to do. So I decided what I would do to phase my self out of teaching gradually and in doing that, take up a hobby and the hobby was always going to be painting.
“Back in 2007, my wife and I went around Australia and I used to dabble a little bit and do some sketching. She said to me why don’t you take some paints with you because we’re going to be on the road a long time, we spent about eight months on the road, so that’s what got me seriously back into painting as such but I didn’t retire until 2012. At 2012 as I phased myself out of teaching I picked up the momentum.”
He, who joked he first took the position teaching at Stanthorpe because they played football (soccer) there and it was far enough from his Brisbane home that his parents couldn’t just drop in but close enough to take his washing home on the weekend, said a lot of his early paintings after retirement were easel paintings.
“I painted in pastels, charcoal and pencil drawings, oils and acrylic and I dabbled in watercolor which is one of the ones I never really felt comfortable with and I still don’t,” he laughed.
Three exhibitions including a one-man exhibition at the Stanthorpe Art Gallery, where he sold the majority of the works he put up for sale. Fired his passion for the painting. He was already painting small murals and when his son suggested him for a job painting a mural in Victoria, his passion for thinking about painting on a larger scale took off.
The Em’s Café job took him a few weeks, starting off doing it when the café was empty but eventually becoming a fixture and talking point for café patrons who got to see him in action.
And of course mural painting is not a one-man job with Morwenna there to keep him on the straight and narrow, mixing paints and being on-hand to help during the process.
