She Lost Her Job, So They Opened a Gallery 20 Years Early. Milford’s Gilded Lily Is Still Here at 26

“This is a retirement story that happened 20 years ahead of time,” Barry Gordon told the Daily Nutmeg.

The plan had been simple. When Barry and his wife, the artist Rosemary Celon-Gordon, retired, they would open a small gallery somewhere. “Our goal was when we retire, we were going to open up a small gallery somewhere, feature her work, my photography and other local artists,” Barry said in the Nutmeg profile, written when the gallery was about 19 years old, which the gallery reposts on its website.

Then the supermarket chain Rosemary worked for moved out of state, and she lost her job. The couple did the research, wrote a business plan and put her severance pay toward the dream. “We worked on it, she broke me down and talked me into doing this early,” Barry said.

Gilded Lily Gallery opened in September 2000 at 101 River St., across from City Hall. Last month it turned 26.

‘We were all starving artists’

Rosemary always meant to be an artist. “I’ve always been into the arts, even as a little kid. I would always dream about being an artist,” she told the blog Also That in an interview the gallery also shares on its site. She studied interior design and architecture at Paier College of Art, did shows for about 15 years, and worked a steady job to support it.

“You know the term starving artist? We were all starving artists, believe me,” she said. It took the gallery for her to feel like the real thing: “I opened the gallery and that was when I realized I was an artist!”

Barry came to art through music. According to his gallery bio, his parents were musicians, and he spent years playing in bands and producing music before he “felt more creative behind the lens.” His artist statement is a question: “Do you like what I see?” In 2011 the CT Post described his prints of “graceful shorebirds gliding over Milford’s sandy beaches.”

Surviving 2008

Opening the gallery was one gamble. Keeping it open was another. “That wasn’t a given,” the Nutmeg wrote. The 2008 recession brought several years of uncertainty.

“Before that time, people had expendable cash… so we were selling really a lot of high-end art… and some great artists,” Barry said. The couple had to find a new sweet spot and “not give up on our quality [while] still having something for everybody and every price range.”

Rosemary’s Christmas ornaments show how they did it. She makes a couple hundred each season, each one different, according to the Nutmeg. They run from $10 cupcakes made of spray foam with painted spackle frosting to $75 Santas made from repurposed lightbulbs with painted paper-clay faces. In between are cork-bodied figures, beaded mosaic ornaments, and glass cats with gold whiskers and pointy teeth. “Because I do so much of the work, you can’t get it anywhere else,” Rosemary said. “I don’t mass produce.”

Beads in relish jars

Her studio in the back room is its own small world. The Nutmeg described paintbrushes standing in glass jars “like flowers in vases” and jewelry supplies sorted into plastic drawers and “odd-sized olive, jelly and relish containers.”

She works in almost every medium. She has made mosaics on children’s violins and antique shoe forms, polymer-clay sculptures, and paintings on foil-backed window glass. “You don’t fire it in a kiln; you bake it in an oven,” she told the CT Post in 2011, explaining polymer clay. People have told her that her work looks Mexican, Moroccan or Turkish. “But what it is what it is,” she said.

The gallery also carries work by more than two dozen other artists, most of them from south central Connecticut, the Nutmeg reported. Rosemary said she rarely buys “more than one of anything… so you’re not going to see yourself coming and going.”

What keeps them going

Rosemary described her routine to the Nutmeg. “I work every single day, and if I don’t, I don’t feel right,” she said. “Even if it’s a few hours, I still have to get my hands into something.”

The Nutmeg concluded that running Gilded Lily “may not exactly be retirement,” but that the couple admitted it sometimes felt like it: “a lucky chance to do what they really want to do.” The gallery’s website is currently promoting a new batch of Rosemary’s handmade Halloween ornaments. Twenty-six years after a severance check, the early retirement is still a job.

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Photos courtesy of Gilded Lily Gallery (gildedlilygallery.com).