My 2020 in some ways just began, but with all that’s going on, that’s easy to understand. Focusing on writing is saving me during this pandemic.

I’ve just finished writing the Prequel, Inheritance Spurned, to my Highland-Cape-Fear-Conspiracy Thriller Series–and Stone of Her Destiny, Book I, many of you have bought from Amazon or Kobo.

I have one disclaimer and one forewarning.

You may have sensed a literary divide between contemporary and historical. So have I. But I don’t understand why.

My feet are firmly planted in both camps, lol. I love current time zones, but I love historical stories. I’ve grown up around history where every house, every framed picture, every path prompts a story, and people are still around to tell them. My cousin is a real historian.

BUT, I will drive the tedious historian mad. That’s because I love alternate history. I write some within my novels which are all contemporary or not so long ago. I also play with history. Not revisionist history to “right” a movement we now consider wrong. I’m totally at odds with rewriting classics to purge controversial copy. I’d rather know the foibles of a people and era. But history shaping now, or history still alive, I love. I’m not as enamored of costume and speech pedantry…unless it’s a fragment of an old costume found.

Take the year-old article on Sotheby’s. For £3,000, a 1.4 cm piece of stone was on the auction block–a chip off the old Stone of Destiny–subject of my latest book, Stone of Her Destiny. The fact that the history of this stone can be traced back a millennium has piles to do with its high price–as does the provenance, since it was used in the coronation of monarchs.

When you think that the 1.4 cm piece was kept by Stonemason Robert Gray, who repaired the Stone of Destiny, broken after it was stolen from Westminster Abbey by Scottish nationalists in 1950, you get a hint of what the stonemason knew about history adding worth. The Courier in Scotland wrote that Gray, now-deceased, never revealed whether the returned (repaired) Stone was genuine. The framed fragment went under the hammer at Lyon & Turnbull’s Sale of Scottish Silver and Applied Arts in 2018. I searched the sold registry, but could find no proof of sale of the sandstone piece he certified was taken by him.To the best of my knowledge, it probably sold for that at Edinburgh auction. If not, I’d buy it, given enough fluid cash.

Well, Kenna, my redheaded Southern heroine and I have chased the Stone for some years now. Its first theft was in 1296 from Scone Abbey by King Edward. Even then major figures contested whether or not it was the real stone, at least a look-alike was taken back to England as a coronation stone until now. Their return of the stone to Scotland in 1996 is token, since the crown contracted to have it back in England on the occasion of Britain’s next ascending royal to the throne.

But the real Stone of Destiny, the one that cries out when the rightful king sits on it like happened when Scottish kings sat on it–its whereabouts are hotly contested, even today.

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Renewal by Icon

Already Thinking New Year? Yes, if you’re anything like me.

1. My signal to change is hearing myself whining about appreciation, sales, reads, time. All that good stuff creatives need. Do you have a process for changing direction mid-flight?

2. The first thing I do is write it down. I have so many scraps of paper. Don’t laugh, you “just-do-it” folks. That process is proven to imbed the thought in psyche as a precursor to action. Keeping the slip of paper isn’t the point. Writing it is like a pushpin to memory.

3. Fussing has begun. Upgrade everywhere, in studio, students, subject matter, styles, and products.

4. Inquire. When I began writing and painting, I asked those further along for advice. For ideas. My nephew Peter Granucci told me to determine my icons. So I began making lists of things I loved visually, like owls, butterflies, dragonflies. I kept idea files from newspapers or jottings from journaling that piqued my interest for a plot or a scenario for a book.

When faced with the daunting task of filling a 3-year-long contract for a month-long 2-person show in Southern Pines, I asked what smaller works would shine and sell. Medium range prices were the Exhibiting House’s specs. I’m reviewing these now. Which are repeaters?

5. Make a list, even if you’re not a list person per se. It’s a magnet for related answers called the cluster method.

6. Throw anything you’ve outgrown or never want to see again away. Organize subjects below your pictures. Coordinated clutter looks less cluttered. Throw some pictures away. Hurt, but felt better later. There’s a time to gather stuff, and a time to throw stuff away.

7. Think in series. Enhance what you’ve already begun by doing a new painting in similar colors and subject to extend or form a series. Ooh, that’s good for writing, too. Resonance works as well as novelty. “Airworthy” is the painting propelling my change this year.

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My New Show at Campbell House in Southern Pines, NC Reception Friday, October 4, 4-6pm I’m keen on nostalgia. Keen, but not sentimental. My nostalgia has a Cutting Edge. You might wonder what in the world that means. I’ll try to answer. It means things have halos around them. Like people, they have ‘their day,’ and then age, mellow, deteriorate, or gain patina like an expensive antique would. Or they die. It may mean that besides being three-dimensional, that they are multi-dimensional. An object achieves life outside of the people that own it due to the passage of time. Locks are designed for beauty and longevity to keep people safe. So when they age on abandoned buildings, their beauty beckons me. Their story intrigues. Why, I wonder, are such beautiful fittings left to ruin. I wonder where the owners went or why. Was there a murder or suicide like on Forensic Files, or an attempted arson. I ask myself if the heir or heirs died in a car wreck or in a battle overseas. As a child, I searched the fields for arrowheads. I visited our  250-year old family house and noticed the old doorknobs and decorative fittings. I saw spider webs lit by sun and dew. There is sometimes a sadness surrounding things–or a sense of place. When a moth lands on a windowsill it reminds me of a church basement and family feeds. When a dragonfly lights on a car, the mystery of an ancient creature and a metallic modern creation converge for a moment, maybe even collide. So I try out various subjects–the debris in a barn that saw its day, the sun playing over each piece after tobacco barns were a thing of the past, turned dangerous, and needed pulling down. Born in the outlying area of Dunn, NC, near the Cape Fear River, I have lived around the U.S. and abroad—in Massachusetts, Kentucky, North Carolina, Austria, and Germany. My husband and children and I traveled extensively over the U.S. and Europe. I work in watercolor, oil, and pencil and cannot give either discipline up. My family were arts oriented teachers who encouraged every appealing art direction, even drawing on the wall from my crib. Through influences of the masters, Rembrandt, Reubens, da Vinci, old lithographs in books, these moments were caught and seen. Through foreigners’ eyes as far away as Russia my home and pieces of reality were examined. In a rural setting in the Old South, my light catchers stored up birds, colored glass, warped and decayed wood. That’s how they achieved a cutting edge with me. Nostalgia cuts into my indifference and draws fresh blood and pain, sometimes from their unexpected beauty–and sometimes from sensing the story did not have a happy ending. Learn more »

“Delayed Return”

Living in the South has distinct advantages. Language is one, with its soft, genteel brushing of the ear, or its amusing to the Northern ear craziness that can be rough or fine. Beautiful surrounds is another, as our Northern friends prove by relocating. Raleigh has an astounding number of new residents daily. Friendly and personal are still a plus, and hometown business contact, proverbial, still exists.

Another advantage is actively living with our decay. The famed tobacco barns from another culture, another day, are all but disappearing from our landscapes. I took dozens of pictures of our barn before we had to dismantle it on liability grounds. One drawing I did of an old John Deere tractor in a field is all that is left of the real thing. A strip mall in the outskirts of Fuquay-Varina exists there, now, but my drawing, “Reclaimed,” shows it with the Southeastern greenery, briars and vines, growing up through its wheels, seat, and steering wheel. I went every day for a couple of weeks and sat in my car finishing my piece in graphite black and white. So I guess the series began way back when I did that picture.

That tractor may be gone. But not all the country roads that lead up to such scenes have been lost or paved. And country roads will again do what the John Denver song reminds you they will do; they will take you home.

On my last photographic road trip–that’s one where you get to stop and photograph whatever you see, whenever you see it–I drove into a community that looked like a scene from “Left Behind.” The rocking chairs were set up on the porch still, the curtains hung in the windows, the folding chair made temporary sitting pleasure for a grandchild or a visitor, and the spray bottles of some household activity were still sitting in place like someone had just momentarily gone inside. This painting I’ve entitled, “Come Back Soon,” because it is so deeply inviting.

The front porch Southern mystique has faded somewhat, although two ice cream shops have grown up around Coats and Angier that have that front porch charm, and restaurants like Ron’s Barn promote the feel. We just ate ice cream with friends there the other night, sat a spell, and talked with them and the owner of the business who even on Saturday, had been working all that day. We take our grandchild there and to the other that’s become world famous in Angier (or almost, with umpteen homemade flavors).

The first of the series of the paintings is already finished, ready to enter into a show, “Grooves.”   This was a stunning building, boasting fine locks and hardware that had been left to baste in the sun and rust in the rain, impregnating the curing grain of the wood with reddish browns and the briars and greenery shooting up green tones into the wood. The famous paint crackle shows up beautifully, and the panels in the doors say it was once a fine house. Why such a lovely house would be left to ruin is a question which begs for a story, and I will investigate that one day. Now, however, it was enough to save its artistry with some photographs and paintings of what the artist sees when she looks at these moments, and enters the once private quarters to merge now and then.

Another picture is a close up of the windows, the soul of a house. Another shows a rake leaned up on the house as if the owner went inside for a meal and some sweet iced tea and somehow, just forgot to come back outside.

Another shows the gate into the garden. Yet another shows the slow dismantling of a fine structure over time and benign neglect.

I’ve avoided the clichés that came to mind first, like Come on Back, Now, Ya Hear? and Sit Down and Rest a Spell. I don’t mind the caricature, but somehow it’s a shield against all that poignant warmth and the pain of loss these pictures represent. I want you to go with me and dip into a simpler time and feel where children played outside, got dirty, knew nature, responded to the dinner bell, and the art of calls and whistles and hollering rang out across fields to other people. I wanted you to smell biscuits baking, fried chicken popping, hear the singing, take part in Catch the handkerchief, Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf, and Red Rover, Red Rover, let Mary come over. It’s the back porch communion with aging parents and grandparents who made sorghum and homemade ice cream, and love so strongly.

My beloved South. The long walks in the woods, the grove, building play homes in tree roots with moss and acorns, roaming in and out our outbuildings–the old kitchen, the smokehouse, the barns. I wanted to draw you in to what was significant in my world for so long, and just a setting like these pictures has the power to conjure back a past so poignant with memories it leaves me crying, still. The aging process itself carries with it a poignant beauty, as well.

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