Pamela Poole's Blog

Time passes slowly on a porch in the South, and by design, it’s comfortable and refreshing. If porch-sitting time isn’t spent in solitude and introspection, it’s shared with friends and family, listening as we dream of the future, pour out our hearts, or vent our disappointments and frustrations. More often than not, those conversations shape a Southerner’s character.

Time spent relaxing on the porch offers an opportunity to know and be known by neighbors. It’s the place where even a simple wave of the hand and friendly word can make a person’s day. Surely it’s rare not to feel your spirit uplifted after someone graces you with a wave and a warm, “Hi, how ‘ya doin’?”

As I write this, I’m sitting on my back patio. Twilight and an imminent sunset will be reflected in the rippling waters of the small lake behind my home. The antique metal porch glider I’m swaying in was the one my parents dated on back in the mid-1950’s, and many of my fondest memories of growing up involved this swing on a huge front porch that ran the entire length of my Paw-Paw’s house (I think such a porch is called a “veranda”).

It’s a summer evening, and the frogs are croaking. We call fireflies “lightnin’ bugs” here, and they’re all around, mostly noticeable in the shadows of the trees. An enormous Great Blue Heron splashes the water’s surface for a fishy bedtime snack, then roosts in the tree in front of me.

I’ve owned this glider swing and the matching chairs for about twenty-seven years since my grandfather went to be with the Lord. We’ve re-painted and patched up rather than buying the beautiful new outdoor furnishings on the market because they ground me, reminders of years of priceless lessons I learned from a remarkable man and his relationships on that front porch. People used to stay put after laying down roots, and my Paw-Paw lived most of his life in the house he bought to raise a family in, enlarging and improving it over decades. He passed straight from within its walls into his mansion in heaven.

The house was located conveniently across the street from the Baptist Church where he was a deacon and Sunday School teacher. It seemed to me that he knew everyone, the righteous and the rascals, and I marveled at how they all loved to be around him. They’d stop if they were walking, wave if they were driving, beeped the horn of their cars to see him on the porch swing with his newspaper open, or pulled into the driveway to visit a few minutes. He’d put down his paper or his Bible, ever ready to be a friend. It wasn’t unusual to see the preachers who came and went over the years at my Paw-Paw’s house as they sought his counsel.

When the green beans, corn, and other bounty began to come in from his garden, I’d sit outside with him and my grandma, helping them get the vegetables ready for her to can or freeze for the winter. It didn’t feel like work because I loved their company and their attention. I was important to them, and there was nothing else competing for our time together. I also fondly remember many hours sitting alone on their enclosed back porch in a creaking rocking chair, an old open hymnal in my hand, singing what I could recall of the melody from church worship services because I couldn’t read the music.

My personal experiences in porch-sitting have been the seed of my creative muse, painting Southern sights and writing stories set in Southern culture. The main characters who inhabit my stories have a moral compass. I wish the world was populated by people who were taught what I was on a Southern porch:

-Value and respect other people, even if they aren’t like you, but when necessary, have boundaries in place that they must abide by if they want your companionship.
-Respect what belongs to other people. You do not have a right to it. If you want something they have and can’t work enough to gain your own, it was never meant to be yours and could never make you happy. Find your own blessings with your unique skills and talents so you can be fulfilled.

-Work hard at a job, not at gaining hand-outs. Work earns more than money, it earns respect. No one likes a freeloader.

-People are wired for fellowship, and they are sent into one another’s lives for a reason. Nothing is a coincidence. Behave in the way you want to be remembered or talked about, for you can’t imagine what role a person might play in your future.

--Watch your mouth. Everything you say, in every nuance, matters. You lift someone or crush them, make them think or make them reject your opinion, by your words and attitudes. Nothing magic happens to filthy, insulting words you got spanked for using as a child that makes them suitable to use as an adult.

--Never start drinking alcohol and you’ll never become an alcoholic. You’ll dramatically cut back most of the stupid actions and decisions you make in life, all of which carry some level of regret and consequence for the rest of your life. Same with drugs and cigarettes. No one, in the history of the world, can claim that something good happened in their lives while under the influence of a substance than wouldn’t have been better if they’d experienced it with all their senses. Addictions tear families apart, and it’s everyone’s business if your choices make people around you suffer.

--To truly help someone, you must have put in the effort to become the kind of person who can offer sound advice or practical help. That’s a fearsome privilege, and no one is perfect—you have to look to a higher authority than your own fallibility for wisdom. There is nothing new under the sun, and the Bible will never fail to offer practical examples of how to manage something in life. But Bible knowledge alone isn’t enough--understanding God’s words only comes through knowing Christ, whose Spirit is the teacher and guide.

--Because mankind turned a perfect world into a cursed one, life is full of suffering. It’s proven in history that there will be no Utopia built by mankind, and this will only get worse until the Lord returns. If you aren’t in a life-trial now, hang on, because you will be. You learn something in each one that makes you a wiser person and a better friend to others, who will face trials and need your understanding and help. A cursed world populated with imperfect people has only one hope—a Savior. His name is Jesus Christ.


(For more information about my work as author of the Painter Place saga, see the Books section on my website at Pamela Poole Fine Art. To learn more about my books, shop on Amazon for them or contact me for autographed paperback copies. I'd love to speak to your group! To schedule speaking events, use the contact information on this website.

"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." -Pablo Picasso

Sometimes, artists are reluctant to let go of a favorite original. In a group of artists, I once overheard a long-time artist advise another reluctant one to always sell their work. She said, “You can always paint another one.”

I pondered this advice because intuitively, it didn’t “feel” right to me. There was a reason why this advice was bad. But I was in the middle of being in charge of an art event and had immediate practical concerns to handle. Thinking it through would have to wait.

I did eventually work out what bothered me about the well-meaning artist’s advice to another, from my own perspective, and brought out the launching point for my views in my first novel in the Painter Place series. To lay the groundwork for my point, the section from the first book, Painter Place, follows. To set the stage, Caroline Painter is a young artist and her uncle’s long-time student in a family in which only the artist of each generation inherits the major part of the small island they’ve lived on in South Carolina for over three hundred years. In this scene, she is in the English harbor town of Mevagissey to help her uncle with filming an art video in 1985. Only a week before, she had experienced a painful life change, which opened her emotions to try something bold and different in working out her anger and acceptance of rejection.

Painter Place
“Most of you here know that an original painting is an interaction with an artist. At any given time on any given day, the same subject matter by the same artist will be portrayed differently according to moods and other influences. Sometimes, we paint a scene simply to share it and get people to look closer. Other times, we are working out something inside of ourselves, the way people might talk things through to see more clearly. And at other times, the subject has special significance on a personal level.”
Caroline paused, organizing her thoughts. “One of the terrific things about painting in acrylics is that they are dry enough to handle right after completion. I’ve painted three canvases in the past three days. Two were plein air views of the sea cliffs around Mevagissey, done as experimental compositions. They fall into the category I mentioned about working things out as if we are talking them through, trying to understand them better. Imagine my surprise when the first one sold from the balcony of my room here on the night I painted it. The other one is titled Sea Cliffs and was done for filming here in the harbor yesterday.”
She turned as Wyeth pulled the cover from the painting and the guests showed their appreciation. Facing them again, Caroline hesitated. The guests waited on her expectantly. She inhaled and smiled.
“The painting I’m about to show you was painted today. It’s an example of an artist choosing a subject for its special significance on a personal level, though it did involve working through some things as the former paintings did. It’s full of memories of a girl who likes the sunflowers that grow at her home, and a boy who likes tall ships and is fascinated at how to get all of that adventure into a bottle. Someone here tonight sent me sunflowers yesterday because they’re my favorite flowers and he knew I’d be facing a challenging day. He knew how to show me he understands because he grew up watching me. I daresay he knows things about me that I don’t know yet myself.”

By now, most of my fellow artists will have guessed the point I’m going to make. You’ll never be the same person when you “paint another one.” In fact, if you painted the original with a passion that you worked out, nothing of it remains inside of you to do another. You may trace over the same outlines of the original and transfer them to another surface, you may study a photo of the original image and try to copy it, but frankly, if you do, you’re missing the point of painting in the first place. You should be pouring your feelings about the subject into the painting, and you’ll never feel the same about it as you did the day it first moved you. You should be a better artist than you were for the original, because it was a road you traveled toward honing your skills. You learned things as you worked it out.

Don’t get me wrong. Your second effort might/should actually be a better painting in terms of skill. But it will never “feel” like the day you experienced the first one.

As I worked with my publisher on the back cover blurb for this week’s release of my next novel, Hugo, I was reminded of how people in the Low Country around Charleston, SC described the horror of the long night through which they endured Hurricane Hugo. Many of us can relate to the fear of what might be lurking in the darkness, especially if you add crashing thunder and flashing lightning, or wild winds howling and scaping limbs against our windows, like grotesque fingers of a monster trying to get in. Horror and suspense movies typically play up a raging storm for a very good reason.

The eye of Hurricane Hugo passed just north of Charleston close to midnight, and anyone who thinks it’s melodramatic to personify the impersonal force of a Category 4 hurricane as a monster has never lived through one. Hugo viciously roared onto the coastline at the worst possible time for storm surge—high tide. Marinas were destroyed and boats were left absurdly stranded in streets or heaped in random places in piles. Survivors speak of the monster they could hear but not see as it attacked in the dark. They had to rely on the ghostly blue glow from lightening to discern their suroundings. They were rescuing others in darkness from the black water that carried who knows what along with it. Some didn’t get to the roof in time to avoid being trapped and drowned.

While writing my debut novel, Painter Place, I had the benefit of hindsight, suffering the hurricane's wrath farther inland above Charlotte with my husband and our two small children. I knew the island setting in my novel would likely be obliterated. I began a Pinterest board with links to photos, news, and interviews so that readers who didn’t experience Hugo in the Carolinas could grasp some of the devastation and understand why it ruined some people yet provided opportunity for others.

I believe the publisher described the setting well on the back cover of Hugo:

“Like a monster roaring in the dark of night, Hurricane Hugo came, slamming its Category 4 power into Charleston at the worst possible time—high tide. On September 21, 1989, Painter Place was scoured by a storm surge as part of the writhing Atlantic Ocean, while the 'storm of the century' continued its rampage far inland, mauling the rest of the Carolinas.”

For more information on the historic Hurricane Hugo, see my Pinterest board “Hurricane Hugo in Charleston, SC”

To peek inside my novel inspiration for Hugo, see my Pinterest board “Painter Place Saga, Book 2, Hugo”

To peek inside my debut novel inspiration for Painter Place, see the board “Painter Place, a novel by Pamela Poole”


For more information about the Painter Place series, see the "Books" page on my website at http://www.pamelapoole.com

Painter Place

"Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, "one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."

--Hans Christian Andersen, The Butterfly

In my last blog, I began my call for creative people to free themselves from the slavery of a little screen full of the latest and greatest technology and remember who you are. Inspiration is all around us and can come anytime, anywhere, conveniently or not. Don’t miss it—be ready! The world needs your detours from the new normal into your role as a “divergent.”

Pablo Picasso once said, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” Who talks like that anymore? Who stands still long enough to consider the sky or a spider’s web? We’ve been conditioned to have the attention span of a goldfish, and it is wrecking our relationships and other important aspects of our lives.

I was (thankfully) born before computers were household necessities in the United States, so I can say with conviction that had anyone told me how distracted Americans would be right after the turn of the century, I’d never have grasped that we’d have sold ourselves so cheaply. Sure, I’d read or heard about dystopian classic books, but naively assumed that since they'd explored so many possible consequences of losing what makes us human, society would consider themselves forewarned and would avoid the pitfalls of the road we were on.

That was in my younger days. Now absolutely nothing surprises me. Nothing.

Social satirist Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, written in 1931 and published the next year, was written in reaction to his disgust in American values during a visit here. Outraged by the American culture of youth, commercialism, sexual promiscuity, and the obsessive, self-directed and inward-looking nature of so many citizens, he explored these pet peeves on a stage of general dystopian fear of losing individual identity in a world racing headlong into the technology of the future.

In that new world, Huxley set up the “World State” to establish a stable global society that permanently limits the population so that they are easily managed, conditioned to accept their station in the contrived life the State has ordered for them. Methods of controlling their lives include getting rid of natural reproduction and meaningful relationships, brainwashing children through education systems, discouraging critical thinking (serious books are banned, and movies have the added element of touch sensations and deal in pure emotion), and individual action and initiative is considered abnormal and reprehensible. The well-adjusted citizens in that society spend their leisure in communal activities that demand no thought.

Yes, you read that right--I did say he wrote that book in 1931. Don't take my word for it, use your critical thinking skills while it's still legal and go look it up. And while I personally can’t stop the train that the technology-driven masses are on, I can encourage creative people to smell the proverbial roses while they’re still growing. Better yet, go out and paint them plein air, or cut some to put in a cut glass vase and rise to the challenge to paint all the reflections in a still life! Poets, word-smith your observations on the delicate colors and textures in a rose, or the irony that such beauty comes with thorns. Musicians, craft a melody that makes us pause to listen to your interpretation, and make it so catchy that we hum it the rest of the day. Gardeners, brainstorm how to gift the world with a new variety of hardier roses. Architects, design a setting to show off roses to best advantage, and provide a bench where we can sit to contemplate their beauty.

Get out in the sunshine for a walk or bike ride, especially one that will likely take you to a bend in the road where you’ll stop in your tracks and gasp at the view. Think critically, be an individual, don’t follow the sheep glued to little screens while they follow one another off a cliff.

Embrace life as a divergent. Rise above the machines and show the world what it means to be human.


If you'd like to read some meaningful yet light adventures about creative divergents, check into my novel Painter Place and the upcoming new release HUGO in a few weeks on December 8. HUGO will take readers into Arles, France in 1989 for the Centenniel of Vincent's life there. For more synopsis of the series, check out my "Books" section on my FASO website at www.pamelapoole.com
Painter Place

When the movie Divergent came out, I felt understood. Finally, there was story about how utterly crucial the creative, intuitive people in society are to the well-being of the whole. Despite the ease in which they are misunderstood and judged for their non-conformist ways, the world desperately needs them.

Creative people believe anything is possible, imagining the unimaginable and convinced it can be accomplished. Even if the goal is a long shot, they’re willing to take risks and will be the first to jump in and get to work, ignoring the naysayers whose voices have become a background buzz that’s plagued and discouraged them all their lives.

In studies of the life of Leonardo da Vinci, I’ve always been struck by his insistence that most people live a limited existence, unaware of what they miss by never looking around them in appreciation. If that was true in his time, he’d be astounded at how little we even look up from a cellphone to notice where we are or who we’re with. I live near NC State University, and was passing by the school one day right after classes began for the fall semester. As I sat at the traffic light to let students cross the four lane highway on their way to dorms on the other side, I watched how they barely bothered with the unwelcome interruption of looking up in a herd mentality to follow one another across the street, eyes back down to their phone screens. It was like a watching a bunch of zombies, except that zombies might have their heads (skulls?) up and they would’ve been vastly more interesting!

If those students were living life using their God-given gift of senses even part of the time, they’d unchain themselves to richer lives and would understand creative people more. For those like da Vinci, life is fascinating—brighter, ablaze with color, alive with movement, scents, tastes, and unusual sounds, and composed of intriguing shapes. There is something to learn about and enjoy all around them, not because their senses pick up more information, but because they take time to look.

In that way, though most creative people are considered to be introverts, they actually spend more time looking outside their own world than “normal” people do! They glean information and fuel for endless impossibilities from around them, while other people are looking down at typically narrow, self-focused pursuits. The creative ones get to experience heightened emotional responses because in their eyes, the world it not a blur—it is loaded with meaning and possibilities!

The creative people among us find it difficult to do monotonous, repetitious tasks, because they thrive on the excitement of discovery and accomplishing something novel. Public methods of teaching are the antithesis of how creative people think, bent on squashing dreamers and thinkers and stripping most artistic and creative courses. After all, a look at history shows that people have always feared them, preferring a complacent, controllable populace that does not challenge the direction of meaninglessness that they are being led into—exactly like the herd of students crossing the street to the tune of the Pied Piper on the little screens that control their lives. This truth has never been clearer than in the cookie-cutter mindset of America’s classrooms right now.

Stories such as the Hunger Games and Divergent reveal a great truth—whether they realize it or not, society needs creative thinkers, however reluctant, who can show them what it means to be alive.

It is with a full heart that I blog in tribute to the city I always consider to be home, Charleston, SC. I swing between tears for their loss and tears of pride and joy at their unity in the wake of the violence that took nine precious lives as they held a prayer meeting in church.

The photo reference for my painting Charleston Red Shutters was one that I took when my husband and I celebrated the release of my first novel and my birthday in February, 2015. The novel series, Painter Place, is set on a fictional island about an hour north of Charleston, with family interactions in the city. Some scenes occur at Middleton Place and on the Battery in White Point Gardens. My husband surprised me with a long weekend at Two Meeting Street Inn, just across the street, and we walked around town to map out an important scene on Church Street for the third novel in the series. I also photographed the rough cobblestones of Adger's Wharf, mentioned in the second novel, Hugo.

If you've ever visited Charleston and strolled the cobblestone streets, peeking into gates that beckon with curled iron fingers to look into quaint gardens, you know that Charleston Red Shutters is a typical example of the charm of Charleston. Among all cities in the entire world, she is the Belle of the Ball, the shining example of courtesy and kindness in a world spinning in a maelstrom of confusion.
Painter Place

I watch the old movie "Pollyanna" annually to keep my perspective, and "The Glad Game" is often mentioned in my house. In one scene from the movie, the coffin maker snidely insults Pollyanna by saying that she's been running all over town pestering people with sunshine and happiness, and it was enough to make them sick. Never mind that is was lack of ability to find sunshine and happiness that created a sickness in town.

Pollyanna's wholesome attitude isn't due to privilege, but to her missionary father's life lesson. It was his greatest gift to her before he died, leaving her an orphan. He had little else, since they lived on what came out of the missionary barrels sent to them. She learned some things the hard way like other children do--then turned the consequences of her mishap, deception, and mischief into a greater good by seeing value and opportunity in them.

The first time I saw the movie, I was dismayed that she disobeyed and decieved her aunt Polly, and as a tree-climbing tomboy myself, I would never have dared that tree outside her window. She is not the perfect little princess sitting around in lace and doing needlework. But her ability to spring back, move forward, and find meaning in everyday life is an inspiration we could all do well to model.

In my novel Painter Place, an unscrupulous British photographer applies the Pollyanna label to American artist Caroline Painter, who is visiting his country. It will be up to the reader to decide if it was a rightly-placed description. Fortunately, others in Caroline's sphere of influence appreciate a wholesome, positive outlook when challenges come.

Some people have a different way of playing Pollyanna's "Glad Game." They call it making lemonade when life gives you lemons. Either way, the world needs more people who choose to live life making a difference for others rather than creating a bondage of self-imposed victimization.

After all, as Pollyanna's dad believed, God wouldn't have mentioned being glad and joyful so often in the Bible if He didn't think it was important!

Back when Pinterest was new and you had to be “invited” to join, I accepted an invitation from my cousin and investigated it as a venue to collect information and inspiration. At first, I wondered if it was just another time drain that would keep me out of my studio, but quickly found so much potential in it as a tool that I blogged about it. It was one of my most interactive blogs and Linked-In discussions. This new venue was initially greeted with some fear by photographers and artists, because of the increased chance for copyright violations. But I could see that it was here to stay and encouraged creative people to benefit from it.

Down the road from that first introduction to Pinterest as a venue, I’ve found it to be one of the most valuable tools I have as an artist, author, and craftsperson. Since there are lengthy tech-laden articles online about how to use it, and I’ve included one such link at the end of this blog, I want to briefly just touch on the ways I’ve found it useful.

As an artist, I’ve created boards to collect research on articles and images I know I will need for future projects. Some of my boards are for a collection of blogs and demos I would like to re-visit occasionally, or don’t have time for at the moment but want to go back to find them later. One of my boards is simply for color combinations, and is useful when planning a new painting. I also place some of my own paintings on boards, linking them to my artist website for better viewing and to potentially meet new friends who like my work.

As an author, I can’t imagine what I’d do without the Pinterest collections I’ve created for my “Painter Place” series of novels, which have saved me so much time! Since I mention music in my series, YouTube performances are pinned in the boards, as well as car styles, hairstyles, movies and cultural events of the times, and setting locations. Readers of my Painter Place series will find a storehouse of fun to help them have an interactive experience with the novels.

To see my boards on Pinterest, you can find my profile at https://www.pinterest.com/pamelapoole...

For more information on using Pinterest for your own creative endeavors and collections, here is a link that I found useful: http://www.yourwriterplatform.com/use...

Visitors and locals to Charleston, SC, can vividly experience settings described in my novel Painter Place, which launches the Painter Place saga Painter Place. Readers will enjoy scenes that take place downtown and in the area, such as the Battery and Middleton Place. In the next novel of the series, Hugo, they can taste something of what it was like for those who lived through the devastation of this direct hit to the old city and upper coastal area.

Some interactions in my upcoming novel Hugo bring up the iconic emblems of the original bridges over the Cooper River, the Grace Memorial Bridge (Old Gracie), erected in 1929, and her sister structure, the Silas N. Pearman Bridge, built in 1966. These bridges were to Charleston what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, or the Golden Gate Bridge is to San Francisco. When they were removed in 2005 after the opening of the fantastic new Ravenel Bridge, Charleston lost two significant historic landmarks. But they gained the third-longest cable-stayed bridge in the Western Hemisphere. It is designed to ride out winds greater than Hurricane Hugo and being shaken by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake.

The old bridges spanned the Cooper River, a tidal river that joins with the Ashley River to form scenic Charleston Harbor, where the Battery is at White Point Gardens on the peninsula. The river has long been part of the history of Charleston as an important commercial waterway. Old Gracie was almost three miles long and built to handle cars the size of Model A Fords of the 1920s. The bridge made Charleston more accessible, and when it became overwhelmed by the increasing population and size of vehicles on US 17, the larger Pearman Bridge was built parallel to it.

Old Gracie was dubbed “scariest bridge in the world,” and you can only appreciate this infamous title if you have ever driven across it. To give you a mere taste of the experience, I’ve included two links within this blog of people recording their crossing. Many more are on youtube, a testament to the reputation of the bridge. When I lived there, I was told the bridge inspector himself wouldn’t go on it, and after Hugo, many wouldn’t cross it again. If you want some stories, read the comments made by people who viewed the videos, and imagine an accident on one during rush hour! I have a grown family member I won’t name who was terrorized by the thought of traversing Old Gracie.

I’m focusing mostly on Old Gracie because she’s the one my characters won’t cross after Hugo, either, and gets mentioned twice by name. By 1995, the year the third novel in my Painter Place series (Jaguar) is taking place, the bridge scored only a 4 out of 100 (4%), or an F, in safety. This was also the year it was in a notable movie, Die Hard With A Vengeance (not a personal endorsement of the movie). In the scene where the two main characters jump from the bridge to the ship, observant viewers will notice that instead of the tall buildings you’d expect in New York, the background is marshy. The bridges were used in other movie sets as well, including White Squall with Jeff Bridges.

Arthur Ravenel Jr. ran for SC Senate as a way to solve the problem, with a vision for an 8 lane bridge to replace the Grace and Pearman sister structures. Construction started in 2001 and the new bridge opened in July 2005, at which point the original bridges closed for demolition. Pieces of them are scattered for historic purposes around the area or dropped into the river as reef for fish.

I’ve traveled the old bridges and the amazing new Ravenel Bridge was built while I was living there. In fact, a highlight of any trip I make back “home” to Charleston is to cross the new bridge, which doesn’t even feel like a bridge to me. The photo I included with this blog on my website is my own viewed at this link: http://pamelapoole.com/blog/91257/som...

I snapped this photo from the perspective of the marsh at Patriots Point where the USS Yorktown is anchored. One of the older bridges is being dismantled in the shadow of the new one. You can find better photos and beautiful paintings of the original bridges online.

Now for the interactive part of this blog--you can watch some trips across the bridges on youtube! For credits, follow the links. The first ones are of the oldest of the Cooper River Bridges, Grace Memorial (Old Gracie):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8e0j...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-auv...

I love this one! Once this family is on the Pearman bridge, they turn the cameras so you have views of Old Gracie on the driver’s left and the huge new Ravenel Bridge on the right. They show the Yorktown in the harbor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEJsK...

If you have some Cooper River Bridge stories, I hope you'll leave comments.

Since I can't get to Charleston, SC often enough, I follow facebook pages that post photos of the area on any given day. They feature gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, historic sights, harbor views, beaches, and iconic views that make Charleston a favorite city in America. Today, I came across this video and was intrigued by the title, "A Love Letter to Charleston." Immediately I was hooked by the musician walking on the Battery at White Point Gardens, where I was walking myself six weeks ago. The haunting melody he began to play was perfect for the mood of the arial views of the city and outlying areas. If you'd like to enjoy the musical and visual love letter yourself, find it here:
https://vimeo.com/108797951

Little wonder that the Charleston area has become my main muse for Southern Ambiance in my work as an artist and author!