“On the Tellico” (portrait of Thomas Victor Terry, Jr.; Tellico Plains, TN)
Pencil, pastel, & watercolor
2014 (NFS)
My father spent many years, when he was very young, camping and hiking along the Tellico River (about two hours south of us in the Northeastern mountains). This included at least one disastrous year, just after high school, when he worked for the Forest Service…..trapping and killing feral Russian boars (which had escaped from some millionaire’s menagerie in Asheville in the 1930’s and, afterwards, multiplied horrendously, as gigantic and vicious hogs tend to do).
25 years later, when my older brother and I were 10 or so, TVA began to finish the last its enormous projects (google The Tennessee Valley Authority), which involved flooding the entire Tellico river valley, with all of its history (unavoidably including that of the Cherokees and other tribes, far in advance of European settlement).
So, my father took us down there a lot…knowing that it would all, within a few years, be underwater….with motorboats racing acorss the lake’s surface and developers’ pricey condos jammed up and around the edges of the lake. Which is how it all turned out, in the end. I haven’t been back since then.
This small painting is of my brother, Victor…….from an originating photograph taken by my clever father in 1970. Go to: