Totally Random Thoughts About New Work

Here are two more images from Montgomery Bell State Park in Dickson County, Tennessee. Middle Tennessee is rich in streams and rivers, and I have frequently been drawn to Montgomery Bell's creeks for painting inspiration. The painting on the left is another example.

In the 1800s, the area now known as Montgomery Bell State Park was the site of a booming iron industry. Montgomery Bell, originally from Pennsylvania, was one of the iron industrialists operating in the area and prior to the Civil War was considered to be the richest man in the South. The area's iron industry produced cannonballs for General Andrew Jackson's armies during the War of 1812 as well as pig iron for machine parts and domestic uses such as cast iron cookware.

The industry declined in the second half of the 19th century and eventually this area was a community of landowners using the land for crops and timber. In 1935, as part of the New Deal projects, the land that now is Montgomery Bell State Park was developed as Montgomery Bell Recreational Demonstration Area. According to Wikipedia, this was a program of the National Park Service that built forty-six public parks in twenty four states, all of which have now become units of the National Park Service or part of state parks. Montgomery Bell State Park was one of the latter, having been given to the state of Tennessee in 1943.

Lake Woodhaven and the park's other two lakes, Creech Hollow and Acorn, were constructed during the Great Depression by the Civilian Conservation Core as part of the Recreational Demonstration area program. The painting on the right is another view of the Lake Woodhaven spillway, this time as I encountered it in autumn, on a day when the lake was mirror-still.

I have found that the spillway itself is really picturesque in person, but I have not been able to convey that to my own satisfaction on canvas, although I have tried twice. I imagine that to really get that right I'd need to sit a while at the site and consider what it is that makes the spillway so pleasing to look at. Not a bad way to spend some hours!

I do love to paint water and the reflections and perturbations it offers. The fact is, I love just being near water too, so maybe there's a connection there.