Escape on the Chesapeake

                                                                                             30"x40" ($250 plus s&h)

Another one of my narratives. A man concealed only by a large brimmed hat and the darkness of night tries to escape into open water. Threatening guards patrol the mouth of this inlet. Note the left bank of the inlet is a field of dead salt meadow cordgrass and the right bank has lively smooth cordgrass--the dichotomy is a deliberate illustration of the stakes our protagonist faces.

Patuxent Oyster Shucker

Okay, in certain areas of the country you can still domestic oysters being exported. The Pacific Northwest still has a good deal of them. The waters of the Long Island Sound are doing what they can to produce some for market and then you have the comparatively miserable few still coming out of the Chesapeake Bay--a name which literally translates to "Great Shellfish Bay" in Algonquian (the once dominant Native American tribe of the Mid-Atlantic States.

When oysters were as plentiful in the Chesapeake as say six and twelve-pack beer rings in the Anacostia (the lesser-known DC river), they controlled the local economy as much as say, technology companies and the Federal Government do today. At a time when I wanted to know more about my ancestry, I thought and read about this period in this region's history. More intimately, I thought about my ancestors who undoubtedly had a much closer relationship to the land and waters than we do today. Among being farmers and craftsmen, they fished and shucked and sold oysters. This painting was an homage to them and the hard, tedious work they did for survival and as tradition.

Carroll Family Plantation

                                                                                         30"x40" $300 + s&h

With this piece I tried to imagine how Poplar Island, Maryland would have looked 40 years after the historical Carroll family's farm had been sacked by the British in 1812-14 and fields of cord grass and vines had taken over the once tilled land. The scene is something I have written about in my historical fiction novel I've been working on and I found it always helps to paint and write about the same thing. One informs the other.