The Marchioness returns to the Canebrakes (Part Three)

Alongside the highway between Eutaw and Demopolis there’s a large field dotted with strange sculptures. They’re made of hay bales, or welded together from junk metal. Any passer-by is welcome to stop and explore. I first visited the place at least twenty years ago. It was an afternoon in August and the heat silenced us all as we waded through the wet air. I was glad to see the display was not only still there, but that it had grown.Read more

The Marchioness returns to Demopolis (Part One)

In Ross King’s ‘The Judgement of Paris’, there’s an entertaining comparison between the working methods of Manet and Meissonier. In his rush to wow the Salon of 1868, Manet repeatedly bungled his ambitious canvas of the execution of Mexico’s Emperor Maximilan. The event was fresh and shocking, but Manet was not one for research. He was competing with the likes of Goya and Gericault- timing was everything, details be damned. As a result, as technicalities about uniforms and an absenceRead more

The Exile

In the early summer of 1817, a group of French settlers arrived in the wilderness of what would become southwest Alabama. They were Bonapartist exiles- among them Napoloeon’s foremost generals and aristocrats, forced to leave France after his final defeat. Where the Black Warrior and Tombigbee rivers meet, they founded the town of Demopolis, but their efforts to cultivate a ‘vine and olive colony’ there were doomed from the start. I read this story (for it feels like a folktale)Read more

Misogyny

Even by the standards of the genre, ‘Pretty Polly’ is a menacing murder ballad. It’s the tone of the young man’s voice. “You guessed about right,’ he replies to Polly’s concerns about his manner, “I dug on your grave the best part of last night.” Her submissive replies only make the song more chilling. They act out parts written long before them. Even though he murders her in an act of control, Willy’s crime seems the only choice left toRead more

Silver Dagger

A faded red barn in Madison County, its sides hung with raccoon skins. The nailed pelts remind me of the sinister French fairy story ‘Bluebeard’- a Breton folk tale that, like many of the ballads, has its source in an actual crime. The young, new wife disobeys Bluebeard’s warning to never enter one locked room in his castle. When curiosity overcomes her, she finds a room scarlet with blood and the hanging corpses of her husband’s past wives. But theRead more
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Mary

I interviewed a number of women at a shelter in Asheville. The idea was to create a series of paintings that would symbolize their experiences, while maintaining their anonymity. One story took me some distance from Asheville. I found the place she had left behind. Her story, like some others, involved evangelical judgement on the part of the abuser. A church nearby had some overturned statues in the graveyard. This was the starting point for the painting, ‘I have ledRead more

A kindred spirit

The four paintings that came together as ‘Young Hunting‘ included an interpretation of an abandoned house I had passed many times on the road between Asheville and Scaly Mountain. In painting there’s some rule about not placing your subject directly in the middle of the canvas, but  doing so sometimes works to advantage. The photographer William Christenberry has recorded the vanishing architecture of Alabama’s Black Belt in just this way- each building carefully centered, emphasizing every symmetry, neatly framed byRead more

Conjured Ghosts

At twilight, a trestle bridge between Whittier and Cherokee- a span of rusted steel, old timbers and stained concrete across the Tuckasegee River. The steep banks are choked with kudzu, dotted with the hulks of old cars. Most of my paintings begin with places that don’t need a visible ghost. The settings feel quite haunted enough. But the ballad series offers a new pleasure- by placing the figure in the landscape I can be a film director of sorts. TheRead more

‘I HAVE LED YOU’ (PROVERBS 4:11)

In The Spring of 2013, I conducted a series of interviews at a women’s shelter in Asheville. I was interested in documenting real stories relating to the South’s ‘culture of honor’ and how it had directly affected women’s lives. There were certain recurring patterns. There was a repeating male type- the young man who is both sensitive and macho. The poet/musician/rebel. Such a person is at first in thrall to their partner. This dependency quickly leads to jealousy, suspicion and a needRead more