LINES FROM NORTH CAROLINA

"Blue Ridge Parkway Sunset" by Cindy Lou Chenard

If travelers want to indulge in visual overload, Asheville, North Carolina, home of the River Arts District, (aka RAD) , is THE destination. RAD is a place where 23 industrial and historic buildings have been renovated to accommodate 200 artists who have set up their studios inside. Here, artists work in a variety of mediums — fiber, metal, paint, wood —producing some of the South’s finest art in old warehouses along a mile of waterfront on the French Broad River. 

We spent three days in Asheville, sampling art and international cuisine, and managed to catch the last show of Neil Simon’s “Proposals” at the Flatrock Playhouse in Hendersonville, North Carolina, thirty minutes away from Asheville. The visit to the playhouse was a hairy experience as we lost our way for a few minutes on the return trip to the motel in Asheville., arriving at 11 p.m. with my anxiety at high levels and vowing never to attend functions in unfamiliar places after dark again. 

My favorite visit (the fourth one in recent years) remains the River Arts District where I encountered Cindy Lou Chenard who creates two-and three-dimensional contemporary landscapes and abstracts. I was attracted to the use of horizontal lines in her work which she calls “Art Des Couches De Bois,” (Art in Layers of Wood) I purchased two cards, one entitled “Blue Ridge Parkway Sunset;” the other named after one of my favorite contemporary hymns, “Morning Has Broken.”

"Morning Has Broken" by Cindy Lou Chenard

A former weaver, Cindy Lou begins the process of creating her art with a photograph or sketch of a mountain landscape or an abstract design. In the process of creating these scenes, she scales her design to a desired size and transfers the layout to pieces of thin birch plywood. Using either a bandsaw or scroll saw, she cuts out shaped pieces of wood, sands and paints the pieces, then assembles and secures layers and custom frames her three-dimensional artwork. I was drawn to the purple, yellow, and orange colors in the two cards that showcased her work and talked awhile with Cindy, long enough to meet her husband and a huge dog weighing over 130 pounds that plopped down in front of me. Mr. Chenard, a French Canadian, listened to our stock lecture on Cajun Country, and we passed a good time reviewing the merits of French cuisine for him.

A North Carolina native, Cindy Lou has a BS from NCSU School of Design and exhibits her work in the River Arts District and Woolworth Walk in Asheville. Her work is reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe’s landscapes and creates a grand sense of space in viewers.

When we returned to the motel, I was surprised to see the vivid orange and yellow line designs in carpeting throughout the halls and rooms and wondered if decorators for the new motel had taken a leaf from Cindy Lou’s beautiful work.

RETURN TO ASHEVILLE

Asheville street band singing
Jambalaya, crawfish pie...

It's nice to open the windows at night and let in the fresh air of the southern Appalachians. Although we refer to a sojourn  in Asheville as a "Busman's Holiday" because we have the same type terrain on "The Mountain," Asheville does provide a dose of city life we don't get in our village of Sewanee, Tennessee.

We're staying in a renovated Queen Anne style home in Montford, the National Historic District of Asheville. The neighborhood is a homogenous area touted as having 600 structures that reflect a diversity of architectural styles that were built between 1890 and 1920 when Asheville began to burgeon as an important city in North Carolina. Due to the vision of a lumber magnate named George Willis Pack, residences began to spring up in an area designated as Montford near the turn of the 20^th century. Some of the residences became boarding houses similar to those immortalized in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, but most of the imposing structures were the homes of businessmen, attorneys, doctors, and architects who represented the upper middle class of Asheville.

Although the architectural style of the homes in the neighborhood is described as Victorian, the prevailing style at the turn of the century was Queen Anne, a style with which I'm familiar because as a child I spent summers in my Grandmother Nell's Queen Anne style home in Franklinton, Louisiana. It's a style that has corner turrets and towers and irregular rooflines—Grandmother Nell's home reflected that description, and her roof boasted a cupola with a stained glass window.

27 Blake Street, Montford historic district, Asheville, NC

We're enjoying a room in the home of Carolyn Spain who once ran a boarding facility and now rents out one room for tourists, a lovely room with woodwork painted a soft shade of mauve and high ceilings, filled with antique oak furniture and an authentic clawfoot tub in the bath. From one side of the room, we can look out at a series of interlocking gardens filled with sunflowers, roses, azaleas, morning glory vines, Echinacea and a gracious plenty of dogwood trees. Carolyn, our hostess, pointed out a small pond that a few days ago held prize coy fish before a blue heron flew in and devoured them.

Carolyn's home is the Bosse Bryan House, circa 1897, a Queen Anne style residence, built by J. H. Bosse who migrated to the U.S. from Germany in 1866. He owned and operated a grocery on Haywood Street and constructed this residence 31 years after coming to Asheville. Later, the Bryan family occupied the house from 1920-1970, and Carolyn bought it during the 1980's when she began massive renovation work. The house's architectural style is described as having "notable features that include irregular massing, a prominent polygonal tower clad in shingles at the upper level, and a recessed porch with Montford brackets." This residence is located not far from the famous sanatorium founded by Dr. Robert Carroll who treated Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, for a psychiatric disorder. Zelda was among nine women who perished in the 1948 fire that caused the main building of the hospital to burn to the ground.

Another residence in Montford historic district,
Asheville, NC 

The artistic influences of notables like Bruce Price and Frank Lloyd Wright can be seen in several houses in the Montford neighborhood. The homes reflect the upscale segment of society that existed in Asheville at the turn of the century and for several decades thereafter.

We sat on the side porch that is the private entrance to the room in the Bosse Bryan House and enjoyed drinks with Carolyn and her friend, Berry Bate, who does ornamental ironwork and sculptures, one of which is featured in Carolyn's garden—a giant replica of dogwood flowers rendered in copper and iron. Berry has created a plethora of artistic pieces for historic places in Asheville, including the pedestrian entry gate to the Biltmore Mansion and a rhododendron wall piece for the Grove Park Inn.  She has done metalwork for over 2,000 residences, and for cities, universities and corporations.  Berry says she's inspired by forms found in nature and that her mind whirls with new ideas for artwork.  Her studios are located in Asheville and Lake Toxaway, North Carolina.

Adjacent to the Montford residential section is the Riverside Cemetery, known for its natural landscaping and for the gravesites of two of my favorite authors, Thomas Wolfe and O'Henry. Thomas Wolfe used the cemetery as the background for a moving scene in Look Homeward Angel shortly after Ben Gant (Wolfe's brother) dies—a place that Wolfe has a character describe as one in which "…you can get a nice view of the town…" 

WRITER’S PILGRIMAGE

Each time we travel to Asheville, North Carolina, where the artistic life abounds, I feel as though I'm  on a writer’s pilgrimage because I inevitably end up visiting the homes of deceased writers. This week, I again stayed at a hotel next door to “The Old Kentucky Home,” the Asheville home in which American author Thomas Wolfe grew up. I toured it for the fourth time! During this tour, I learned more about the 1998 fire that destroyed much of the large yellow frame home that provided the characters and background for Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, and I purchased a video that showcased the six-year restoration, which cost $2.4 million dollars. Right now, the home needs a new coat of paint, and I put a small donation in a box reserved for the $35,000 needed to provide several coats of yellow paint.

Thomas Wolfe’s mother, Julia Wolfe, cashed in on the real estate boom of the early 1900’s in the “Land of the Sky,” as Asheville was then called and bought the sprawling yellow house, described as “Queen Anne architecture," in 1906. She left W.O. Wolfe, her husband, in his home on nearby Woodfin Street and took her youngest son, Tom, with her to the Old Kentucky Home on Spruce St. Thomas Wolfe disliked living in the home because Julia made it into a boarding house, eventually expanding it to include 18 sleeping rooms, and Wolfe had to move from room to room almost nightly to accommodate strangers who lodged at The Old Kentucky Home. Wolfe later described himself as a “vagabond since I was seven – with two roofs and no home.” He escaped the boarding house and Asheville to attend the University of North Carolina and under the tutelage of Edwin Greenlaw, an English professor at the university (actually my distant cousin), he began writing apace, later developing a passion for playwriting.

After attending Harvard, Wolfe taught a few years at New York University, then traveled to London where he wrote most of his bulky novel, Look Homeward Angel. After enraging the townspeople of Asheville with his thinly-disguised autobiographical novel that contained more than 200 local characters, he stayed away from Asheville for eight years until the furor died out, quipping that “You can’t go home again but there are other places and you can go there.”

On the same day as the visit to Wolfe’s boyhood home, we traveled south, arriving in Flat Rock, North Carolina to tour “Connemara,” the farm to which Carl Sandburg moved when he was 67. Carl Sandburg, poet, biographer, author of American folk tales, and collector of folk songs, completed more than one-third of his works while living at Connemara atop Glassy Mountain. He had moved there to find the seclusion necessary for writing, as well as to have ample pastureland for Mrs. Sandburg’s goat herd. At this writer’s retreat, Sandburg spent most of the night writing and slept late, but he ate dinner with his large family and recited from his writings at the dinner table, his youngest children restlessly enduring sonorous recitations for sometimes an hour.

Connemara was a large home filled with Sandburg’s library of 14,000 books and old periodicals (he subscribed to over fifty periodicals). The Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site has the distinction of being the first park to honor a poet. Connemara sits at the top of a 0.3 mile trail and climbs 100 feet – the height of a ten-story building – and I was winded when we finally reached the summit. Goats still inhabit the area and are relatives of Lilian Sandburg’s original herd. They are Toggenburgs, Saanens, and Nubians, and children who visit with their parents are allowed to make friends with them. At one time, Lilian Sandburg’s goats numbered over 200, and helpers milked 50-80 does twice a day. Mrs. Sandburg gained fame for her dairy goats and for her work improving the herd’s bloodlines and production of milk. Her goat milk and cheese were sold throughout North Carolina.

I was impressed with the video of an interview between Edward Murrow and Carl Sandburg and came away pondering Sandburg’s answer to the question: “What is the worst word in the English language?” Sandburg promptly replied: “Exclusive.” Sandburg’s answer reflects his life as a lecturer who deplored the exploitation of workers and child labor. He also received honors from the NAACP for coverage of the 1919 Chicago race riots and worked to achieve social justice, and garnered the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1940 and in Poetry in 1951.

The last night in Asheville ended on a real “hoop-la,” an event in a downtown Asheville park where hula hoopers, ages three to sixty, danced to T.O.U.C.H. Samadi, an electronic trance dance experience that is popular with those in a program called “Asheville Hoops.” Hoop dancing is touted as a way to exercise and relax emotionally, and the movement to electronic music supposedly transports the hula hoopers to a fourth level of consciousness. The young man in the foreground of Vickie Sullivan's video seemed to be a good example of one who had reached this level.