Upcountry at the Cashiers Design Showhouse

Cashiers, North Carolina

The studio is mostly crates this week. Thursday I drive up out of the flat country and into the mountains for the Cashiers Designer Showhouse, and what's going in the car is forty-five small panels, one large trout in two parts, and a wet palette I intend to use for a live painting.

There is an old Carolina distinction I grew up hearing and didn't think much about until I started making the drive: Lowcountry and Upcountry. Two halves of the same state that share a name and almost nothing else. Down here the water is warm and brown and moves twice a day, regardless of whether anybody's watching. Up there it comes off rock, it's cold enough to hurt, and it only goes one direction.

I've spent this year painting redfish. Now I'm going where the fish are trout, and I've been thinking about what that changes.

Chasing a Fly | Rising to a Dry Fly, Oil on Linen

Capturing a Trout

A redfish in the shallows is a painting about disturbance, the surface giving, the tail breaking through, the moment the water tells on him. It's a picture of something arriving.

A trout is a different proposition. A trout is a painting about color under water, which is one of the harder things oil can be asked to do. That pink lateral line, the olive over the back, the spots that aren't black so much as a green so dark it's given up. None of it holds still, and none of it looks the same wet as dry. Rembrandt would have understood the problem. It's the same problem as skin.

So that's what I'll be working on Thursday night, in the middle of a party, painting in front of whoever wants to observe and chat like at Palmetto Bluff. A rainbow trout, from the beginning, on an easel, with a drink likely going warm on the table beside me.

I don't do live painting because it produces better paintings. I do it because a painting that appears in front of you is a different object afterward than one that arrives finished on a wall, and because the questions people ask while it's happening are the ones they'd never ask at a gallery. It allows me to deeply connect with the curiosity of each observer.

Shellfish Cracker & Rosemary Bundle Tondos | 10 × 8” Oil on Canvas

Forty-Five Southern Stills

The other half of what's going in the car is forty-five tondos, small oval panels, ten by eight, each one a single subject given the whole surface.

Some are trout. Most are not.

The rest are the Lowcountry, traveling. Oyster shells. A shrimp. The blade of a shucking knife. The things that end up on a newspaper-covered table in October when somebody's cousin has a bushel and a propane burner, and the whole business of the evening is people standing up, working with their hands, and not being in a hurry.

I painted them small and I painted them one at a time. The oval does something a rectangle won't, it has no corners to hide in, so the object has to earn the center or the picture fails. Forty-five of them is a discipline I'd recommend to anybody. You learn very quickly which objects have something to say.

And I'll admit the arrangement pleases me: carrying a crate of oyster shells and shrimp up into trout country. The mountains and the marsh don't have much in common except that in both places the good evenings involve a lot of shells on a table and nobody checking a phone. The people here are the same, good hearts and often traveling between both up and lowcountry

The Diptych

The large trout goes up in two panels.

I won't say much about it before you see it except this: I broke it in two because a fish that size, painted whole, becomes a specimen. Split across a seam, it becomes a movement. The eye has to take in each moment the fish reveals itself, much like panning the water for some glimpse of head or tail.

She Proudly Swims the Waters | Sporting Painting by Hampton Watts

A Mountain Affair

The opening night party this year is called A Mountain Affair: Celebrating Cashiers & Its Outdoor Traditions, and I think it's the reason I'm the right painter to have in the room.

There will be bluegrass. There will be fly-tying demonstrations. There will be plein air painters working outside.

It’s a room full of people doing skilled work and commissions with their hands in front of other people, which is a genuinely old arrangement and one the South has been better at preserving than most places. A man tying a Royal Wulff and a man painting a trout are doing more or less the same job: looking hard at something small, and getting it right because getting it wrong would be obvious.

I'm glad to be the painter at that particular table.

Where to Find Me

Thursday, Opening Night I'll be live painting the trout at the party at the Village Green, with the diptych and the full run of tondos on view.

Friday, Painting at Plateau The work moves to Plateau Fine Art, where it'll stay up through the run of the showhouse. You can find me there Live Painting more work on Friday.

The Design Showhouse runs August 28 through September 5 at Cashiers Lake, thirteen designers, one house, and a shuttle from Lewis Hall at the Village Green. It benefits the Cashiers Historical Society. Every ticket goes to keeping the record of the beautiful place intact.

Come find me and say hello if you are in the area this weekend!

— Hampton