Once upon a time...
This is one of my favorite older paintings--don't ask me why, I was just happy with the way it turned out. The barns are all gone now; the Jeep dealer is where they once stood (or it was, before GMC's recent troubles and the only Jeeps available here are used), but this is how it looked when I first moved to town. I tell Joseph that sort of thing a lot...poor man. "That's where the cool old grocery store used to be; this was once the feed store, before the fire; this was the Pepsi plant; this is where the beautiful Victorian depot was...we tried hard to save it..."
The town was quite a bit more interesting then, quirkier, less homogenized.
No McDonald's, no Waffle House, no boutiques, no big car dealerships, no Walmart Super Stores--no Walmart. Just interesting little mom-and-pop groceries and liquor, feed stores, farms, meat lockers, hardware stores that had everything you could imagine needing as well as owners who knew where it all was, picturesque and slightly seedy little motels--even individual little camping cottages, remember those?
I liked it. A lot.
And painted a lot of it. I'm glad, now, and still try to capture things before they're gone. When you live in the same area for 40 years, you realize how much changes, and how quickly.