On January 2, 2021 I drove around Hilton Head Island, South Carolina looking for a “drawing set” to make good on my plan to take up drawing as a means of stress relief in the New Year. I found a Michaels and purchased a pencil set with a sketch pad and went home to get started, telling no one because of how improbable it was that I would be a visual artist. I sketched a rooster, using a beloved momento of mine as inspiration—a pen and ink sketch done by my Great Grandmother Blanche Sugg in 1913 when she was 15 years old, a few years before the last great pandemic raged (Blanche’s original is below). She was born on a Tobacco farm near Hookerton, North Carolina, in Greene County.
One year later, it is hard for me to imagine my life without the outlet of visual art, and the emergence of this passion has proven puzzling for many who know me well. And truth be told, for me. However, it feels right and good and correct and I love and want to share it.
I am starting this newsletter—Remembering What I Never Knew—to chronicle my journey through art, memory, and place to help me make sense of both my inner life and the one we share, by focusing on the importance of memory and place in forming and linking us as fellow human beings. I do not lament lost years without art—I wasn’t ready and was too distracted. It took solitary time brought on by a pandemic joined with the privilege of a job that is easily done from home for me to look up and see what had been hiding in plain sight all along. Blanche died at age 52 in 1950, and I got started at age 53, so maybe I am just picking up where she left off. It is my hope that this newsletter will help you to look for, find, name and appreciate beauty and truth wherever it is found. This is most plainly what art has done for me and that is a lot.
Each newsletter will feature my original art and a reflection about memory and place, and I will also point you to contemporary artists that I admire in shorter public posts that can be shared with a goal of pointing you to where you can support these artists. My art will focus on scenes from Greene County, North Carolina where I spent summers harvesting Tobacco in the late 1970s to mid 1980s living with Blanche’s daughter Maxine and my Granddaddy P.L. Barrow, and seascapes inspired by Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, my happy place. I am working on two book projects—a historical novel set in Greene County that revolves around land theft covered by seemingly legal means, a story that also echoes on Hilton Head, showing the complexity of memory and place. The second is a memoir, told via the mechanism of a biography of my Grandfather P.L. Barrow and a man named Jack Hill whose farm being taken is the inspiration for the novel.
Here is my version of Blanche’s rooster drawn in pencil on January 2, 2021, more than a Century after Blanche left a signpost for me. Happy New Year.
Don Taylor
Don, this is a beautiful gift. Thank you for sharing and creating an invitation to reflect and explore what uniquely brings us meaning. I am excited to discover with you. Wishing you a healthy and nurturing new year. Dawn