Seven years, fifty four paintings, and one mill town cottage

It was a bit over seven years ago when I bought Gracie — a mill house in a forgotten village named Lockhart, population 617. Deep in rural South Carolina, Lockhart is located in the way-outer bands of both the Charlotte and Greenville-Spartanburg metros. At the time I was banking on these cities to continue growing like crazy and gobbling up all the land in concentric circles around them — eventually reaching little Lockhart with exurbanites hungry for affordable real estate and quiet streets. Although progress has been slower than estimated, it still looks like a pretty good bet.

In addition to bringing the cottage back to life, I brought quite a few paintings into the world. Isolated as I was, there wasn’t much else to do. Not counting scribbles and false starts, the number is somewhere around fifty four. In addition to research and retail projects here and there, painting essentially sustained Gracie and me over this time … including a couple of nail-biting pandemic years. As a life in art goes, that performance is an acceptable minimum. Ok, ‘acceptable minimum’ is less than spectacular, but it does mean I get to keep making art.

Here’s Gracie February 2017 and May 2024. Although there is still plenty of work to do, she looks a lot better now. The same is true for Lockhart.