watercolor
18″x20″
2008
Horn Quarter is a beautiful, old, Federal house in southwest Virginia (King William County, which is to say that it’s not NEAR ANYWHERE). It’s been empty for years, and one almost hopes some corporation will buy the place just to stabilize the house. The spiral staircase ascends all the way from the basement to the attic. As I said, it’s quite beautiful….
**NOTE!!!! ** January 2012. Having written the above 4 years ago before promptly forgetting that I ever painted “Horn Quarter”, I was more than a bit surprised, last month, to receive a polite, but fairly insistent email from a lady in Virginia who, it turns out, OWNS Horn Quarter. She rather firmly suggested that I might alter my description of the house she and her husband bought in the 80’s and have subsequently restored to the nines. I suppose I’d be rather irritated if I’d spent all that time, energy, and money on a house which, when googled, is described as a neglected wreck. It occurred to me that, actually, I’d made the painting from a 1960-something interior photograph, and that the latest exterior photograph I’d seen (in which several of the windows and the front porch are haphazardly boarded-up) was in my 1980 edition of “the Virginia Landmarks Register”. It simply hadn’t occurred to me to consider that I’ve had that dang book since I was 20…..which was rather a long while ago, to say the least. In any case, I’m awfully happy to correct my previous description, and glad to hear that this lady and her husband did come along to restore the house.
