Tag Archives: landscape

A Bridge to Somewhere by Alex Joyner

Car driving over bridge under darkened sky
 

Something there is that doesn’t love a bridge. At least on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Oh, when I lived there, we were proud of the engineering marvel that connects the waning end of the Delmarva Peninsula to the Hampton Roads metropolis across the Chesapeake Bay. With two tunnels, four high bridges, and twelve miles of trestle bridge across the mouth of the nation’s largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is an impressive structure. But natives of the Shore have always viewed it with some ambivalence, much as they have viewed the rest of the land “across … Continue reading A Bridge to Somewhere by Alex Joyner

The Best of the Breed: The Art of Nancy Bass

White cow, painted
 

  Given her first crayons at three, Nancy Congress Bass drew a picture of a pink poodle. She loved the slew of cats housed down the street and would grow up to be an artist with a penchant for painting animals of all species—roosters, pigs, birds, bears and sheep. Her favorite would be the cow.   In 35 years as a professional artist, Bass estimates she’s probably painted hundreds of cows and is still counting. “We live in harried times…cows take us back to when life wasn’t beating so fast. Cows are very calm, especially … Continue reading The Best of the Breed: The Art of Nancy Bass

The Kent Store Journals, Writing Place and Time by Roselyn Elliott

Photo Mexican Sunflowers
 

Autumn 2003 Beautiful, downtown Kents Store, Virginia boasts two businesses, a store with snacks and sodas where hunters register the deer they’ve just shot, and a funeral home (not for the deer). Across the road is a post office, a fire hall, a Masonic Temple constructed like a brick ranch house, a brick church and a cemetery. About a mile from the store, we live on 3.2 acres where our house sits 300 feet back from the road behind an expanse of oak, hickory, beech and loblolly pine. Behind us for an equal distance is … Continue reading The Kent Store Journals, Writing Place and Time by Roselyn Elliott

Somewhere in Arizona by Marsha Owens

inside of Antelope Canyon sandstone formations
 

Somewhere in Arizona   dusk swallowed the day we spent in gold-red dirt tracing rocks with unsteady feet where each thin-air breath seemed as tentative as tomorrow. So we slowed our pace, you and I, we who brought our wounded selves to each other, paused to feel the earth’s arms around us when down in the clearing like a child’s painting splashed onto a concrete page, the doe took center stage—just a whisper, watery legs sufficient, her elegant head arced downward. She knew I watched. She didn’t care how I envied her vulnerable assurance and … Continue reading Somewhere in Arizona by Marsha Owens

Joshua Trees by Carla McGill

Joshua Tree National Park
 

Joshua Trees   They are repetitive across the hills for hours, stillness in the space around them. As for the sky, one dark cloud drawn out as if between two hands and me underneath, held together by skin, scrutinizing the world for severity, for intention, for final episodes. The other cars seem lost, but the road is even, the pavement, newly blackened and unbroken. Destinations and departures, resolutions of the human creature—they all soar past like blackbirds and hawks. It is the piercing alertness of the lizards that stays with me. I know they are … Continue reading Joshua Trees by Carla McGill

Ebb and Flow: Paintings by Annie Wildey


 

  “I’m not a high summer, beach-going dweller,” says artist Annie Wildey, a native of Britain who grew up far from the sea. “But I love the beach on the quieter days, the days when people wouldn’t think of going to the beach – when it’s foggy, just before or after a storm or when it’s snowing, “I identify with the ocean when a storm is brewing or passing, when the surf is up, when flurries form, when the fog looms or is lifting, when the horizon is obscured or the sky begins to clear. There’s a … Continue reading Ebb and Flow: Paintings by Annie Wildey

Of Darkness and Angels  


 

The premier poetry event of this year’s Festival of the Book in Charlottesville was “Shrines to Longing,” the March 20 reading by Charles Wright, America’s current (20th) poet laureate, and Mary Szybist, who was a student in the University of Virginia’s MFA program when Wright was on its faculty. Both poets attended the Iowa Writers Workshop. Both have a distinctly Judeo-Christian flavor to their work. The 79-year-old Wright read from his 24th book of poems, Caribou, Szybist from her prize-winning second volume, Incarnadine. Although the full house at UVA’s Culbreth Theater was clearly entranced by … Continue reading Of Darkness and Angels  

Subject to Change: Paintings by Richard Crozier

painting of Woolen Mills dam
 

  Artist Richard Crozier’s works are subjects of change…change of seasons, change of light, change of landscape and skyline. Over the past four decades, he has produced more than 3000 “portraits” of the Charlottesville area in transition. In 2011, Crozier retired as professor of studio art from UVa’s McIntire Department of Art, where since 1974, he’d taught beginning drawing and advanced painting and became known for his encouraging and engaging style. He continues to paint daily, producing up to five scenes a week. “The thing that interests me a lot are landscapes that are in … Continue reading Subject to Change: Paintings by Richard Crozier