Old country stores first caught my eye as subject matter for my artwork about three years ago.
I was driving down Route 17 between Tappahannock and Saluda. I had my camera along to photograph a barn that I'd wanted to paint.
As I passed decaying old country stores on that road, I realized that they would soon be lost forever.
These structures are all linked by architectural familiarity, but marked by their vernacular individualism.
They are quite different from the fast paced comings and goings of the convenience stores of today.
Their replacements, built by our mobile society, are cookie cutter copies of some of our worst examples of late twentieth century clutter.
As this century was ending, I became interested in these buildings that were so much a part of everyday life for my parents and grandparents at the century's beginning.
Not many of these old buildings are still standing, I wanted us to peer into the dusty windows of time, and hear the stories and the laughter, to emotionally experience the feelings,
smells and tastes of a place that has faded and blurred (like these photographs) back into time before the last thread of their existence disappears.
My first expressions of these photos as artwork were completed two years ago. I manipulated the images and converted them to watercolors on my computer.
I then printed them out to heat transfer film and transferred them onto paper. This artwork exhibited by me starts from the same color photos.
I scanned them into my computer and removed items like road signs and power lines. Next I converted the image to a sepia tone and layer it with other images.
Finally, I distressed the printed image by hand to "age" it, before transferring it onto paper.
"Distressing the image to "age" it - is to take the viewer emotionally back to a time gone by, to evoke the feelings of when life was simpler,
to reflect on the small pleasures of life, such as an ice cream cone, which could be purchased for 5 cents, when lard and flour,
corn meal and penny candy shared the same shelves as bolts of cloth, and to a era when the country store was the oral news place of the community.
Quite different from the fast paced comings and goings of the convenient stores of today. |
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| Country Store Series |
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