Gravestone Artwear breathes life into death

It seems only fitting that Gravestone Artwear, a business based on art made from gravestones, should be hidden away in the bottom of a building. It’s even more apropos— almost unbelievable, really—when you learn that the store occupies space that was once used by an undertaker to embalm bodies. The space seems destined to always contain something pertaining to death.

But, Gravestone Artwear is less about morbid and scary and more about art and celebration. The business has spent over a decade tucked in the basement beneath Austin Block in the center of York Village, Maine. It is here that Cassandra Chernack has built up her silk screening company, turning gravestone rubbings into wearable art. Behind the cases of goodies and racks of clothing are the screens and tables where Chernack works her magic, meticulously carving her designs and applying her graphics to cloth and paper. In the retail part of the store, there is nary a spot that isn’t covered with books or baubles or things with feathers or fangs.

Gravestone rubbings are impressions taken by rubbing wax onto paper placed over the face of headstones. It is a hobby Chernack has had since she was a little kid, when her mother, who taught her the process, started taking her to cemeteries to collect rubbings.

“She liked more of the willows and ferns, and I was always like ‘Death and bones!’” she said. Many years later, Chernack began turning those rubbings into something more.

“I was 16, at York High School, in the art department, and Gary Phipps showed us how to silk screen. It was the real old primitive style, where you had to use Exacto blades and cut it all out yourself,” she said.

Chernack cut a design from one of her rubbings and made a couple of shirts. The shirts garnered a lot of attention, so Chernack began making them for her friends. She visited cemeteries to get new designs, and rented a booth to sell her art at Harvestfest, a craft fair held every October in York, where Chernack promptly sold out of shirts. Later, after graduating from high school, she attended the Massachusetts College of Art, where she majored in metal-smithing and photography. But for the school’s semi-annual craft bazaar, she made her shirts.

“I worked like hell to get all those shirts printed. It took me forever, but I sold all out of my shirts again,” Chernack said. “I was kind of amazed that people were buying my shirts and kind of impressed, because I just liked to do it for myself. I never thought I’d make a career out of something that I love.”

Upon returning from Boston, she apprenticed at a silk screening business, where she further studied the trade and skill of silk screening. She says her parents always backed her 100 percent in whatever she did, and it was her mother, Paulette, who suggested she start her own business, even quitting her own job to help out. The business opened in 1995, primarily as a mail order company. Yankee Magazine soon published a piece about them, bringing Gravestone Artwear into the public’s eye. Chernack and her mother started to see a large increase in business.

Chernack’s designs are intricate latticeworks of skulls and bones, birds and epigraphs. Most are actual rubbings from headstones, where skulls with wings might guard over names and dates. She also has a few that aren’t from actual headstones, but designed in homage to people like Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. More recent designs are from her Gravedigger’s Union series, featuring skeletons performing manual labor: the ‘pit crew’ and the ‘skeleton crew.’

The Internet has played a huge part in Gravestone Artwear’s growth. “If you Google ‘gravestone rubbing’ or ‘gravestone art,’ we’re number one, and I love that,” Chernack said.

Gravestone Artwear’s most recent exciting accomplishment was the sale of its gravestone rubbing kit to a major publishing house. “If a rubbing is done the right and the correct way, it’s actually good for the stone, because it removes some of the lichens and mosses,” Chernack said. “Most people don’t realize. They think you can go out with tissue paper and a big charcoal pencil or graphite pencil, and (that way) you can really damage the stone.”

Chernack put together a kit that includes a book and all the right tools needed to do a rubbing correctly. Cider Mill Press recently bought the rights and has begun distributing it worldwide, in such places as Borders and Barnes and Noble. “Makes me shake when I think about it. I have an ISBN number in the Library of Congress!” Chernack said.

Some people consider Chernack’s art morbid, but she explains her work in such a way that they usually change their minds.
“One of the best things, I think, is when people walk in here with that attitude and they leave with a whole new frame of mind. Graveyards are museums without walls, and they’re such a piece of history, especially here in New England … I find it interesting how Americans look at death like it’s such a sad thing and people think it’s morbid, and there are so many cultures out there, like Mexico and the Day of the Dead, where they honor their ancestors and they make it a big festive event and it’s happy, you know, and everything is colorful and bright and there’s flowers,” she said.

Her own headstone? “(Nowadays), graveyards are so sterile, and it’s like they’re avoiding the whole idea of dying and death,” Chernack said. “I definitely want to keep mine in the old gravestone carving traditions, with lots of symbolism that says something about me.”

Chernack now prints about 1,000 shirts a month, all on her own, not to mention all the other items she silk screens, such as velvet cloaks and bags. But, the continuous growth of Gravestone Artwear has not yet warranted cause for relocation to a larger space or a bigger town.

“One of the things I’m horribly afraid of is getting overwhelmingly out of control, and if we did move somewhere else, it might be like that,” Chernack said. “I’ve kind of developed my own pace over the years. We’re quite happy here, and it’s kind of neat to be this little secret. There’s some people that might not understand that. ‘Why don’t you want to get big and make a ton of money?’ But I’m happy doing it my way.”

You can visit the lovely ladies of Gravestone Artwear at 250 York St., York Village, Maine, 207-351-1434, Monday through Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., or check them out on the Web anytime at www.gravestoneartwear.com.