Tag: painting

A Sense of Place

In this painting I’m returning to a theme I explored once before, many years ago, with my nieces as subjects. The current painting has my grandkids waiting at the Ice Cream Window at B&Js Carryout.

One reason I have painted B&J Carryout in Accokeek many times is that, to me, it seems the one location in “downtown” Accokeek where there is a genuine “sense of place”.

A “sense of place” is a characteristic that some geographic places have and some do not. The term is often used in relation to those characteristics that make a place special or unique, as well as to those that foster a sense of authentic human attachment and belonging. It is hard to fake and too often planned development fails to take it into account. Right now, Royal Farms is proposing a chain gas station/convenience store across Livingston Road from B&Js. Besides being out of scale with our little center (the project has 58 parking places!) and its likelihood to interfere with the ability of the Accokeek Volunteer Fire Department to aid the community with fast responses to emergencies, I think the real reason I oppose the project is that it will be detrimental to our sense of place. Once a sense of place is destroyed, it doesn’t really come back.

Another Sunflower Painting

So I already painted sunflowers once this summer, which I blogged about at https://thirdagethoughts.com/sunflower-maze/. Yesterday I finished a second sunflower picture, inspired by the same experience. This one was a little out of my comfort zone because of the small figure, which I’m not sure I’ve done before. But I am a fan of expanding the comfort zone! I thought maybe I now have sunflowers out of my system but then I read that Van Gogh painted them 15 times. He wrote in a letter that he used sunflowers to express ‘gratitude’. I think I have plenty of reason to express that!

Plein Air

So I have been painting more. My successful artist friend says he paints every single day! His work is quite beautiful so I presume a side benefit is ‘practice makes perfect’, but I’m afraid right now I’m motivated because it gives me something enjoyable to do. I like being outside and I like walking my dog. So my methodology is often to walk the dog while carrying my travel easel and to pause when I see something interesting to paint and then paint it. There is some necessity to work fast because the light will change too much if you don’t. That works for my dog. There is a special term in French for this painting outside activity: Plein Air. This landscape of a farm road was painted earlier this week.

Landscape Painting at Marshall Hall

I have a lot of memories Piscataway Park’s Marshall Hall site, former site of an amusement park and Southern Maryland gambling mecca, and also the current site of burned out historical mansion. I remember going there as a child in the amusement park days and once accidently wandering into a slot machine building where no one under sixteen was allowed. My husband worked the toy helicopters there as a teenager so that may have been our real first meeting, although I don’t actually remember riding the toy helicopters. I liked the mini-roller coaster better. My son was married there in an outdoor winter wedding where it was only about 10 degrees F outside. My late mother-in-law was born there in a long-gone house where she remembered as a baby sleeping in a room with snow blowing in through the cracks in the siding. There are still old amusement park rides rusting in the woods. I got the chromium for my element collection from an old rusting truck where the chrome trim was practically the only thing left. I remember riding my bike down to the site in 1981, when the mansion caught fire, with baby Piri in the rear bike seat, arriving in time to watch it smolder.

There is now a rutted old dirt road remaining that winds past the Marshall family cemetery and really doesn’t go anywhere. At the end of this road, I painted the scene of some trees overlooking the Potomac.