Art in the Hill Country, Part One: StudioSwan

It was a lovely evening for a walk, and I hurried on my way from Hill Country Montessori, down Atlanta Newnan Road to Selburne Lane and into Serenbe. I traversed the mile quickly, eager to be to the gallery before any participants arrived.

April was an exciting month for the Sense of Place Workshop Series. After three fairly successful months housed in Rico Center, Thursday evening gatherings moved to Serenbe, beginning with an evening visiting StudioSwan Gallery, owned by Tom Swanston and Gail Foster. In the future, we will meet in The Studio, an inviting new wood-floored, white-walled room off of the courtyard in Selburne Hamlet.

I was excited at the opportunity to tour the gallery and studio spaces with Tom. I cannot recall any other times I have had the opportunity to tour the working studio of a renowned artist. I was thrilled that Tom had readily consented to share his work with our workshop group.

Ultimately there were nearly a dozen of us, gathered in something approaching an oval in StudioSwan gallery. Around us, the walls were covered with images on plywood of human beings with animal faces, engaging in everyday activities such as riding bicycles. The works were all part of an exhibition called "Astral Images", by emerging Atlanta artist, Meta Gary. Tom quietly welcomed us, explaining that Mina (who manages the gallery) couldn't join us, and that both he and his wife had been stricken with bad colds while they were in New Orleans the previous weekend, at an opening of Gail's work. I could empathize, as I broke into a few rounds of sneezes and felt my throat begin to get scratchy. I only wished I could have an exciting story such as a New Orleans trip as background for my emerging cold.
Tom talked to us for nearly an hour, there in the gallery. He told us about his background, from meeting his wife in art school and eventually opening a gallery of others' work in Atlanta, to his move out of the city and many years spent living in rural isolation along the Chattahoochee River at the western edge of the Hill Country. He told of being drawn into Steve Nygren's vision for Serenbe, until he was finally owning and operating the first (of what he hopes will be many) gallery there. His picture of gallery efforts included an honest assessment of financial realities -- including the enormous costs involved in opening (especially publicizing) a gallery exhibit, even in such a small space as the one room of StudioSwan. I appreciated how much an artist must also be (or have access to individuals who are) financially savvy, able to market their own work vigorously and relentlessly. As he described it, the key was to get an interested buyer to accept artwork "on loan", so that they could check out how it went with their living spaces. It sounded as if, at times, it could be more a matter of color and pattern agreement than simply liking a picture and wanting it to hang in the livingroom. Meanwhile, Tom patiently answered questions about art marketing, plans for the gallery, and former installations there. At last, he invited us to come upstairs and into his studio space.

Climbing the steps, even through my head congestion I could make out the marvelous warm scent of beeswax, one of the three components of encaustic art (more to follow). Tom lead us first to his "ideas table", a simple surface covered with all manner of works in progress. He explained that he is fond of rugs, and had been involved in a number of projects designing them of late. Enthusiastically sharing with us dozens of sketches and drawings of carpet patterns, he radiated a sense of joy -- of fun -- in his art. I felt the surging delight of creativity for the delight it can offer -- the kind of creative ventures in which one explores new designs and new possibilities in a dialogue with various materials and themes. Along the way, there is no room for regret over mistakes. Tom explained to us that there aren't accidents to him, but that anything that might be considered an accident (such as a few unintended drops of paint) were simply incorporated into his work. I felt a growing sense of envy. How marvelous it must be to while away the hours on a weekday afternoon in such a sunny space (windows were everywhere), dreaming up new possibilities and "playing" with acryllic paints and encaustics. Maybe I would like to be an artist, when I grow up.

Then he led us into the other part of his studio, where he actually completes his projects. He introduced us to encaustic work, which is done on either thick plywood or else a special metal that also comprised some component of the space shuttle (docking bays?). The medium requires three ingredients: a pigment, beeswax, and resin. He showed us pieces of the resin, whcih closely (and not surprisingly) resembled amber. Or was it rock candy? One of the participants asked, and he responded right away that it tasted horrible. We didn't ask for details. The resulting encaustic pigments were kept in muffin tins until ready to melt on a stove for use in his artwork, such as the piece he has been working with, below.

The surface felt cool and satiny-smooth, inviting a touch or even a caress. The colors were rich, bold, vibrant. The amazing thing about encaustic is that it can grow and grow, by adding new colors and patterns over the old ones, until the first explorations are long buried under resin and beeswax. He showed us another board that he had used for practicing for quite a while. A variety of colors (particularly reds and blues) were simmering in old saucepans, with old brushes sitting atop them. Tom invited us to get started -- to pick a color and explore with it. One of the fascinating qualities of encaustic is that there is also an element of letting go, of letting a work become what it will become. The means of blending a new layer into the rest of the work requires either a blow torch or a hairdryer; as the blending takes place, some patterns become more blurry while others become more refined.

The evening wound down, as some participants had to leave and as I felt the sore throat settling in. Before we concluded, Tom also led us upstairs to the third floor, to view his wife's much tidier gallery space. Many of the walls were empty -- the result of the show in New Orleans. But one painting intended for the show still hung on the studio wall. It includes a single four-letter word, one that had actually been spoken by woman whose life the painting celebrated. Several of us expressed gratitude at the rejection, as we could enjoy it ourselves as a result. Indeed, I felt so thankful for the entire evening, for the opportunity to spend it with so creative, thoughtful, and kind a person as Tom. The future of art in the Hill County is in excellent hands.

An Aside: Sound Mapping at The Cabin Path

On the last day of March and the first day of the fourth quarter at Hill Country Montessori School, the Elementary students all went to The Cabin Path. The Cabin Path is a lovely 50-acre island of forested paths that embraces, at its center, a tranquil lake. The site is named for an historic log cabin that had been carefully dismantled from its original site and rebuilt there, near the shore. The property includes a medicine wheel site, a labyrinth, and even a few longleaf pines. More about this entrancing spot in the future (indeed, I am planning one or two outings there as part of the 2009 workshop series). For now, I am writing about one particular experience there.

The older elementary students had finished an art project and were unfocused, maybe even a bit crazy. To help them slow down, I asked them to go off into the woods by themselves, find a comfortable place to sit for about half an hour, and listen. With plain white paper and a number two pencil, they were to make a "Sound Map" -- a map of all the sounds that they heard from that one spot, with the relative locations of each. I was amazed at how they were actually able to slow down and notice things, and I was equally stunned by all the sounds they experienced all around them. What a marvelous meditation -- a grounding in one's home place! I plan to assign this exercise in one of the Sense of Place workshops someday. Meanwhile, here are three of the maps that they drew:

Did this project make the students more calm and focused? Results there were far more equivocal, I'm afraid. Here is a picture of one of the boys in the group, shortly after he completed this exercise:

An Aside: North to Cherokee Country, Part Two (New Echota)

Above is a picture of a printing press similar to the one once used by the Cherokee Phoenix, the newspaper edited by Elias Boudinot and published at New Echota. Like the Cherokees themselves, the newspaper straddled worlds; half the page was in Sequoyah's Cherokee Syllabary, the other half an English translation. The press now sits in a reconstruction of the original printing shop, on the grounds of New Echota State Historic Site.

Our New Echota visit began with a tour of the home and outbuildings belonging to a Cherokee farm (worked by a "moderately wealthy" family) -- original buildings that had been brought to New Echota to evoke the buildings that had once been there. The students wandered among the various outbuildings, including a smokehouse, corn crib, and barns, which offered windows into how the Cherokees would have lived and farmed about 180 years ago....

Then the tour guide, an experienced storyteller with a rich lore to share and a revisionist slant to his outlook, led us into the Cherokee homestead attached to the farm. For maybe half an hour, he shared stories about everyday life on a Cherokee farmstead, and demonstrated a host of unusual tools, from a device for cutting shingles to a 19th century butter churn. When not taking photographs, I sat and listened and daydreamed of living back then, in the days before the Trail....

He opened the cabin door at last and let in the welcome sunshine of an early Spring day. Then we followed him on a tour of the grounds of New Echota. Most all of the buildings are reconstructions, and only the most significant structures were rebuilt, so the effect is one of walking onto an enormous chess board rather late in the game. Most of the "town" is comprised of open field interspersed with stately trees and interrupted here an there by a 19th century Cherokee building that emerges mushroom-like from the rural landscape. I cannot imagine the community as bustling; it is difficult, indeed, not to imagine the Cherokees living in a sort of bucolic utopia, in a city with almost no buildings except the most important ones. We wandered into each of them in turn, beginning with the Cherokee Supreme Court. The building was clearly IMPORTANT, as indicated by the interpretive signs setting it apart from the surrounding landscape of oak and close-trimmed turf. Once inside, our storyteller regaled us with more tales of Cherokee culture, particularly the way the justice system worked. Then we continued on, visiting the Cherokee Council Hall (a building with an exterior quite reminiscent of the Supreme Court building, but with different-colored shutters), then passing another cabin and outbuilding collection (also brought in from other places), and then down a trail through the woods. Our guide proudly showed off the stretch of open woodland that used to be choked with privet, all cleared out recently by convict labor. At last, we arrived at the former home of Moravian missionary Samuel Worcester. We paused at the door to listen to more stories, about how Worcester was dragged off to prison for refusing to obey an unjust law requiring all whites working with the Cherokee to get a license. I took a photo as evidence of the students listening well (or, at least, leaning against one).
We explored the various rooms (and looms) of the house.
I paused on a stairway to take the photograph below. It struck me as a powerful visual statement of what "voluntary simplicity" is all about. I could have stood there and gazed for hours, or better yet, sat at the table with the light streaming in, rapt in thought....We walked back down the trail to another relocated building, this time the Vann tavern. It was built by James Vann in 1805, and is a marvelously rambling structure. It once stood near Gainesville, along the Federal Road that ran across Cherokee land. Students were particularly entranced by the "drive-thru" window in the back, which enabled those who were not allowed to set foot in the tavern (such as slaves) to buy alcohol and other items. From the inn, we continued to the reconstructed printing office for the Cherokee Phoenix, then wandered over to one of the few structures not rebuilt: the foundation stones outlining the home of Elias Boudinot, where the Treaty of New Echota was signed by Boudinot, Major Ridge, and John Ridge (among others) on December 29, 1835. Soon after the Trail of Tears, all three were murdered in one day of violence and retribution, as had befallen William McIntosh. But the Treaty Party that signed the document did not receive the perks that McIntosh did, and it is far more difficult to see their deaths as justifiable. They saw the only alternative to the treaty being violent (and ultimately futile) conflict, and came to terms with it. The three strike me as tragic figures, acting out a destiny largely beyond their control. As Major Ridge declared afterwards, "I have signed my death warrant."

Our guide gathered us together once more, out on the green grass of the once-village, to regale us with a few more bits of information and answer our questions. Then it was time to take the journey back south, across the Chattahoochee River, into the former homeland of the Muscogee Creeks.

An Aside: North to Cherokee Country, Part One (The Vann House)

I was preparing to put together an entry for April's Sense of Place workshop events on Art in the Hill Country, when I encountered a series of photographs downloading from my camera that had been taken the day after my previous blog entry, while I was on a Hill Country Montessori field trip to sites associated with the Cherokee Trail of Tears. I felt inspired, perhaps even obligated, to share a few words about our journey on March 13th. After all, the Chattahoochee River which bounds the Hill Country was once a treaty line, with the Creeks living on the south side and the Cherokees across the river. Indeed, I can easily imagine many Cherokee traders passing through the Hill Country, on their way to trade in the Creek villages.

I am only an armchair historian, but I am intrigued by the experiences of the Creeks and Cherokees. Next year, our Sense of Place Workshops will include further exploration of the Creek Trail of Tears -- an event precipitiated by Chief William McIntosh. As I described in a January blog entry, McIntosh signed off on the cession of remaining Creek lands in Georgia at the Treaty of Indian Springs in 1825. Short-term, his signature earned him ownership of a one square-mile reserve (the park we visited in January); longer-term, it earned him a much smaller bit of land sumounted by a stone shaped somewhat like a turtle, now lichen-encrusted. He was assassinated (or executed, depending upon one's point of view) by furious Creeks who had no intention of giving up their lands to the Georgians. (At one point, McIntosh, working on behalf of the US government, had even tried to bribe Cherokee leaders to agree to a similar treaty. As a result, McIntosh had been sent on his way south in disgrace, with a warning never to return to the Cherokee lands.)

While the Creeks (particularly the Upper Creeks, living in Alabama) were keen to maintain their traditional ways, the Cherokees adopted the accoutrements of Western culture. On the eve of the Trail of Tears, most Cherokees were living in agricultural communities, living in cabins or even mansions (with black slaves), had developed their own system of writing, and had even drafted a constitution modeled upon that of the United States, with a capital at New Echota. On our school trip, we visited New Echota (where a number of structures have been reconstructed, including a print shop and the Cherokee legislative and judicial buildings). But first, in the morning, we visited Spring Place, the former home of Chief James Vann (and afterwards, his son, John Vann).

At the time of his death in 1809, Chief Vann was the wealthiest of the Cherokee aristocracy. He lived in a fine brick mansion, ran an extensive cotton plantation worked by slaves, drank heavily, and on more than one occasion is known to have beaten one of his wives. What is equally problemmatic, to me, is that his house carries practically no traces of his Cherokee origins and culture. Only in the symbolism of the yellow sunflowers decorating the panels over the fireplace mantle can his native roots be read in the architecture. Elsewhere, the house layout, woodwork, and furnishings (there to evoke original pieces that might have been there) all bespeak a wealthy Southern planter. There is even a compressed block of tea from China (eyed curiously by students in the photo below), which would have been a great luxury indeed in the first decade of the 1800s in Georgia.
There is even a stunning "floating staircase" that graces the central hallway....

But on the stairway landing, between the first and second floors, there is a mark burned into the wood back in 1838. It is a reminder that the owners of that house were, ultimately, just so many savages to be sent out West. The house was given away to a white Georgian in a land lottery, and he showed up to claim "his" home. A member of the Georgia Guard threw a burning log onto the staircase in order to "smoke out" the occupants. John Vann and his family were permitted to take their things with them, but they had to give up their plantation home and take the Trail of Tears, too.

After touring the house with a well-meaning novice tour guide, we wandered the property. Outbuildings included examples of how moderately well-off and "poor" Cherokees would have lived at the time. The students ran around for a while to burn off excess energy built up on the long drive from the Hill Country, dashing off to the area around a spring house ruin, then starting up a game of tag. Then we got back in the van (Vann?) for the half-hour drive to New Echota.

Hill Country Geology, Part Six

Continuing up the trail beyond the first granite pavement outcrop, we came upon the ruins of one of the mills that give Cochran Mill Park its name. The mill building itself was made of wood, and burned as a result of arson in the 1970s, though it had been starting to fall apart before then. The mill operated into the 1950s -- I have read accounts by local residents of trips to the mill to get their wheat ground into flour. One of the mill stones still remains on the site, partly covered by mosses, grasses, and fallen leaves. The stone itself is Panola granite -- we could tell right away from the large feldspar crystals dotting its surface. Local stone, it might even have been quarried right there in the park. I appreciated seeing that stone, carved meticulously out of 350-million-year-old rock, shaped into a tool for human beings to make their bread. I thought of all the ways that granite traveled through the environment -- as exposed outcrop, as soil, as home for potter's wasps, and now here, as human technology centuries old.

We clambered up onto the second outcrop; the trail was much steeper than the access to the first. In-between hunting for xenoliths, I paused to look back down at the mill ruins, picturesque against the backdrop of Bear Creek, on this blustery late winter day.

Chilled by the winter wind, we started back down the trail toward the warmth of Cochran Mill Nature Center, where we would lunch in the main gathering room, amongst the various reptiles and amphibians that call the Center home. Nearly at the end of the trail (where it meets Cochran Mill Nature Center's entrance road), I found a spider's web in the branches of a shrub that had not yet leafed out. Water droplets in the web had turned to ice in the cold morning air, and hung glittering like the jewels in Indira's Net. The spider was nowhere to be seen -- I pictured her (or him?) relaxing in a miniature lounge chair, somewhere in south Florida, sipping Bloody Marys on the rocks. I took several photographs, trying to convince my auto-focus Kodak not to ignore the web in favor of the nondescript branches in which it was nestled. At last, my camera relented, and the result is below.

That was the last photograph I took that afternoon. The trip didn't end there, of course. The eight of us (including Julie's enthusiastic future geologist son of five years, Bruce) all enjoyed lunch together at Cochran Mill Nature Center. Then we drove out the nature center access road, passing to the right side of a series of boulders of Palmetto granite on our exit. We drove maybe an eighth of a mile south, then parked and walked in on a trail that was the original route of Cochran Mill Road, in use probably until the 1950s. Walking a short way down the flat, pine-needle-covered trail, we came to a roadcut that predates the ones along the South Fulton Parkway by perhaps a century. The rock had weathered heavily, and was mostly covered with mosses, lichens, and unlichenized algae (including an abundant free-living green alga that was, strangely enough, 1970's yellow-orange instead of green). We quickly identified the rock as highly weathered gneiss, or saprolite. Bruce enthusiastically demonstrated the auditory quality of a saprolite: a geologic hammer striking it makes a dull thud, rather than the metallic ring of "fresh" rock. We continued down the path toward the wooden pedestrian bridge over Little Bear Creek (the location of one of our school's Adopt-a-Stream sampling sites, but that is another story, to be told in November). Along our way, Julie would stop to examine rocks along the side of the trail where the cut had been made to put in the road. A few hundred feet further along from our first saprolite encounter, we stopped at a boulder of what Julie thought would turn out to be granite. Though heavily weathered, it was still possible to discern the foliation pattern in the original rock, once it was broken open. More gneiss.

Still further down the trail, approaching the creek, we came to another rock, this time only a large cobblestone in size. Breaking this open, Julie was fairly confident that she was seeing granite instead. So the Contact was probably nearby, though it would elude us this time around. We did not examine any more rocks, and I was left feeling that my knowledge of the area's geology was patchy and inconclusive at best. I knew there were granitic rocks (the Palmetto granite) intruding into schists and gneisses (the Atlanta Group), but the story was still murky, the details nearly indiscernable with the passage of time. I could consult a geologic map -- perhaps even the new one -- but I expect that only months on the ground, walking the land, picking up rocks and peering at them with a hand lens, sampling them for microscopic thin sections and even x-ray diffraction analyses -- only all of this would help reveal more of the story. Or maybe, as I have come to suspect through my years as a geologist, all of that would simply lead to new and different questions to ponder.

Hill Country Geology, Part Five

It takes a trained eye to notice granitic xenoliths. Xenoliths, as I have noted elsewhere, are literally "strange stones", bits of other rock that had gotten caught up in flowing magma and managed to maintain aspects of their original character, even if (as in the case of the photo above) they had become partially absorbed into the surrounding melt. Anyway, at first, the granite at my feet looked all alike, except where the solution pits poc-marked its surface, or where the joints ran that linked the pits in a geologic connect-the-dots. But then Julie pointed out a xenolith, and we were all fascinated at the discovery. After all, xenoliths can't be that common, can they, if it had taken us so long to find one?

The reality was that xenoliths of all sorts were all over both of the pavement outcrops we explored. Some were darker than the granite, and were probably true bits of the "country rock" that had been intruded, while others were lighter granitic phases. The novelty wore off, though I was still entranced by some of them -- particularly a large (maybe eight inches long) xenolith of finer grained granite that had weathered out a bit from the surrounding rock (see below). Julie explained to me that the xenolith, which was just downhill from a zone of finer-grained granite, was probably part of the finer-grained phase that, having cooled early in the history of the melt, somehow got ripped away from the rest and incorporated into the remaining

magma. Now, it rises from the granite pavement surface like a miniature Stone Mountain, channelling the flow of rainwater down the rock, causing a small solution pit to form just downhill. I took several photographs of it, thinking about how small a difference in erodibility can, in turn, can cause such noteworthy topographic expression. I was beginning to appreciate the subtle nuances of granite bodies, though the relationship was strictly plutonic.

Hill Country Geology, Part Four

We hit the road again, down the South Fulton to Cochran Mill, and soon thereafter onto the entrance road to Cochran Mill Nature Center. We parked the vehicles, and set off down the trail to a couple of granite pavement outcrops in the adjacent Cochran Mill County Park. This was a different experience -- walking atop the rock, rather than looking at it up above you, from a viewpoint at the base of a roadcut exposure. Here, we could see more of the granite itself, locating enormous feldspar phenocrysts and even noting a slight orientation to them, a flow foliation resulting from the very slow rate of movement (akin to silly putty) of the gradually solidifying granitic magma. It is easy to imagine walking on the very top of a pluton (body of granite), but Julie reminded us that granite weathers by exfoliation, peeling off in layers like an onion, a process caused by the removal of all the overlying material. In fact, the actual pluton would have been much less smooth, and much more irregular, with fingerlike protrusions of granite penetrating adjacent rock units.

We noticed joints -- cracks in the granite where no lateral motion has occurred. These were probably release joints, formed as the overlying rock eroded away. At a number of spots along one of the joints, solution pits had formed in the rock; some were empty, others still held water, and one even held a pine tree. Julie explained to us how the fine red soil in those more vegetated solution pits was probably not transported there from elsewhere on the rock face, but instead formed right there, through chemical and biological weathering processes. That clay originated as feldspars in the granite, now weathered into fine grains, deep enough in places for a loblolly pine to take hold. An ecological successionist would describe the solution pit development as a succession sequence, from bare rock to solution pit to pit with lichens and mosses to pit collecting soil to pit with loblolly pine. This process as I am describing it here has, no doubt, happened many times in such outcrop environments; but the story does not end there. The pines get tall, are blown over by the wind, and the soil on their roots washes away, leaving bare rock again....

I was distracted from my reveries by two round objects in the pine's branches. They turned out to be two beautiful tiny pots, still sealed shut, the living places of the larvae of potter's wasps. I was struck by how the clay had been reworked; the same feldspars, broken down into soil, were reanimated, made into a home for an insect. We are not the only organisms who build elaborate structures, using the natural environment as source of raw materials, and perhaps even inspiration.