I rarely, these days, do anything without a particular person in mind….and this one’s no exception to my general rule. A recent email from the photographer Elizabeth Matheson (she lives only three streets away in this tiny town) made me decide to go ahead with this painting….which I’d started a few months ago.

To see some of Elizabeth’s work (and this is one of those few beautiful, sincere books I’d grab when this old house eventually catches on fire), go to:

http://www.amazon.com/Shell-Castle-Portrait-North-Carolina/dp/0979822602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1442261978&sr=8-1&keywords=elizabeth+matheson+shell+castle

for now?……

“…it isn’t a complete building; it has been broken in pieces inside me; a room here, a room there, and then a piece of a hallway that doesn’t connect these two rooms, but is preserved as a fragment, by itself.  In this way,it is all dispersed inside me—-the rooms, the staircases that descend so gracefully and ceremoniously, and other narrow, spiral stairs, where you moved through the darkness as blood moves in the veins….all this is still inside me and will never cease to be there.  It is as if the image of this house had fallen into me from an infinite height and shattered upon my ground.”

—-Rainer Maria Rilke (from “The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”)