A Show at Palmetto Bluff

Collection of Work | Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina

I grew up in Charleston. I have made my life and my studio in Savannah, and I love the Georgia Lowcountry and all it’s winding creeks. But last week I drove north across the river into South Carolina for a show at Flow Gallery in Wilson Village, out at Palmetto Bluff, and by the time I got past the gate and under the oaks I understood I had come back to a different thing than the one I left.

It is the same marsh. The same pluff mud on the outgoing tide, that low sulfurous smell that people raised on it know with a familiar joy. But the country you are made in does not need your permission to take hold of you again, and the South Carolina Lowcountry had mine before I'd unloaded the car.

Live Painting Demonstration at Flow Gallery | Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina

We poured prosecco. People came in and stood around with those small cold glasses, and I set up an easel in the middle of it and painted while we talked, a Lab, head up, and a mallard.

Painting in front of people is not the same as painting alone. Alone you answer to nobody. In a room you are holding up your end of a conversation and the picture's end at the same time, and what you learn is what people watch for. They watch the eye. They watch the water start behaving like water. A man will stand at your shoulder without saying anything for a long while and then tell you one thing about his father's dog, and you understand him better than you did.

That is the argument for showing up in person. I don't have a better one.

Steve & Debbie with Breaking the Plane

Steve and Debbie stopped in front of two paintings and did not move.

You learn to recognize that with clients, who I often think of as friends. There is the polite pause, which is short and kind and means nothing. And then there is the other kind. They were torn between the two, and they said so plainly, and asked whether they could think on it.

Of course they could. Nobody should be hurried into a thing they intend to look at every day.

But a painting is not really finished until it has met the wall it's going to live on. So that night I carried both canvases over to their house, and we stood in the lamplight and held them up in the places they might go. A canvas can do fine under gallery light and go flat in a room with its own light and its own colors already in it, and it is better for everybody to find that out before money changes hands.

They chose Breaking the Plane. 24 × 36, horizontal, a spottail easing up so the surface gives without quite breaking. It is the brighter of the two, and brightness was what their rooms wanted. The other canvas went back out to the car, admired and awaiting to find its own home. That happens, and it is a joy when a painting finally lands true.

What I keep turning over is what happened after. Standing there, we got to planning for the built-in console on another wall, vertical, a different set of notes, and by the end of the night we had agreed on a vertical painting to answer it. Not a second painting off the rack. Something made for that wall in that house. It is the oldest arrangement in this line of work and I still think it's the best one.

When I walked into the little chapel the next morning, hoping to avoid the rolling stormclouds on their way in, I found an open pew seat. Next to me was none other than Steve and Debbie, no longer collectors but new friends.

I stayed on out there afterward and walked the property in the evening, under the moss and through all that deliberate green, out to where the land quits and the river takes it from there. Palmetto Bluff has arranged itself so that doing very little feels like something you've accomplished, and I did not fight it.

I paint this country for a living, the marsh, the water, the dogs, the light off the river at the end of the day. Not as scenery. It's the material I was handed, and a picture of a redfish coming up out of the shallows is, if it works at all, also a picture of the waiting that came before it.

Quiet Mornings, Cool Breezes | Flow Gallery, Palmetto Bluff

Thank you to Flow Gallery for the room and the evening, to everyone who came out and stood around with a cold glass in their hand, and to Steve and Debbie and to William and Scott for letting me in a ways.

Next I'm turning north and inland, up out of the flat country, for the Cashiers Designer Showhouse in North Carolina. Different altitude, different light, a different green entirely. I'll write about that before I go.

For now the canvases are unloaded and there is a vertical stretcher on the easel with a wall already waiting on it.

— Hampton