Pen and Ink, Watercolor, and gold inks
20″ x 25″
2002
I suppose one could claim, for any number of reasons, that this isn’t a “southern” picture. If nothing else, it now lives in Costa Rica, and the title’s taken from a poem by the unmistakably-English, 17th century poet, John Donne…(“Riding Westward: Good Friday, 1616”).
Still (and if only for me), this picture represents most of the preoccupations of my education at Sewanee. I went to & through 4 gradskools after Sewanee, but I don’t think anything very essential about me changed at all after my graduation. And, yes, I’m well-acquainted with Wallace Stevens’s comment concerning what-happens-to-“pure products”….
For those who don’t know?… “Sewanee” is the familiar name for the Episcopal-owned “University of the South” (although, since they hired some yankee PR firm to slick-up their image, they keep fussing around with and altering the offical name, presumably to attract politically-correct 17 year olds who’d otherwise automatically assume from-the-name that the school sponsors a varsity level Lynching-team. Personally, I wish my grandmother were on the board of trustees so that she could tell them “There’s no point in trying to be someone else just to make someone-you-don’t-even-know LIKE you? It never works in the end…”
