A field reference for a working landscape

The Southern Appalachians have produced a dense, unusually durable art culture: landscape and wildlife painting rooted in direct observation, a still-life tradition carried through community art schools, a figurative strand that is social and often comic, and a craft economy — glass, clay, wood, fibre — that has been organised and taught here continuously since the 1920s. Ridge & Kiln is a reference to that body of work. It is about subjects, materials and methods, not about any one maker.

Each section below takes one strand and explains it properly: what the genre is, what it demands technically, what the region contributes to it, and where to read further. The pages are written to be useful to somebody deciding whether to take a watercolour class, somebody trying to understand why a mountain reads blue at eight miles, and somebody wondering what "giclée" actually means on a label.

The region in question is the high ground of western North Carolina and its immediate neighbours — Watauga, Avery, Ashe and Mitchell counties, the Roan Highlands, Linville Gorge, and the ridges either side of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which runs 469 miles from Shenandoah to the Great Smoky Mountains. Mount Mitchell, at 6,684 feet, is the highest point in mainland North America east of the Mississippi. That vertical relief is why the light here behaves the way it does, and why the painting looks the way it does.