One still life is of five brown eggs, four of them resting on a white cloth, one sitting alone on a yellow-gray countertop. The second shows four red and green McIntosh apples on the same counter. On Tuesday last week, they were hanging in the Peterborough Art Academy and Gallery in Depot Square. On Wednesday, they were gone.

“I love these paintings and I would love to have them back,” artist Michael Tupek of New Ipswich said Friday

He is spreading the word about the theft in the hope that someone will see one or both of the still life paintings and recognize them as stolen.

The paintings are oils on canvas, each 8 inches by 10 inches. They are signed by Tupek in the lower left corner. The paintings were for sale, he said, at $850 each.

Unlike most of the other works of art on display at the gallery, the paintings were unframed, which Tupek and gallery owner Michaela Chelminski both say may have made them an easier target for a thief.

Chelminski told the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript on Friday that she recalled seeing the paintings on Tuesday, and noticed they were gone shortly after she opened the shop on Wednesday. She was talking to another local artist who has works for sale in the gallery, when “I suddenly realized there were two empty spots on the wall.”

Chelminski said she’d offer a reward for the return of the paintings.

She said that in the last 14 years of business, she’s had only two incidents of theft, and she has a theory about what might have happened.

Chelminski recalled how two couples walked into the store last year, then split up and wandered in different directions through the gallery and Tribals’ Rugs by Hand, the adjacent rug store that Chelminski owns, making it difficult for her to keep track of all four of them.

She later discovered a missing painting, in that instance a framed one.

She said she saw the same two couples in the store, doing the same routine, last month, although nothing was taken.

She believes one of the women came back alone to the store last week.

“I think someone has a kleptomaniac side to them,” she said. “I think if she walks in again, I’m not going to be very friendly.”

But she said she has no proof of who may have taken Tupek’s paintings.

Chelminski said security is a challenge for any storeowner.

“What can you do?” she asked. “You don’t want to be too paranoid. There is a fine line.”

As for Tupek, he’s just hoping the stolen art works will somehow turn up.
“It seems surreal that it happened,” he said.

This story appears on Page 10 of the Dec. 22 Ledger-Transcript.