Spent a great afternoon yesterday at the Morris Art Museum in downtown Augusta on Riverwalk with some of my favorite painter friends –  the members of Al Byers Advanced Painting Class. Interesting listening to their comments and to Als who as a professor and a New Yorker always has an opinion which he will readily share!🤗

I thought I would take you on a virtual field trip to the Morris with us. It was one of the first museums to deal only in Southern art. 

When you enter via the stairs the first thing you see are the water colors of Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896-1969.). Ripley caught the South in the early 1900s in a series of watercolors and prints that line the hall at the top of the stairs. 

His bio says “He was attracted by the interplay between the solidity of buildings and the patterns of light and shadow they created, interspersed with people, the snap of a clean sheet drying on a clothesline, and the shape of trees and bushes.” An early urbansketcher!

These are large full sheet watercolors 22×30″. They have great light and shadows. The Picnic above is perhaps my favorite.  

Remember he was painting these fifty – 100 years ago. There’s a certain timelessness to them. They could still be found throughout the south if we only bother to look. Oddly I am sure we could as Urban Sketchers find some of these places and paint them still. Probably a lot more battered but still standing. 

He was getting out and painting the south long before Urbansketching was a thought in Gabes head. 

St. James Church Tallahassee Florida 

Love the glowing white in this one. He does glowing whites so well. 

Southern Shack

I know these still litter the southern landscape. 

Springtime – Southern Church 

There’s is one of these not a mile from where I sit on Hopewell Church Road in McCormick County SC however there’s no great tree with Spanish moss and I never see people there. Is it abandoned. No idea. 

Cabin in Georgia 

Obviously many of these were done along the southern coast because the Spanish moss does not grow farther north in the south just along the coast.  

Planters in the Field 

Perhaps my least favorite. The figures are stiff and it’s too dark. Great handling of the trees, woods, and that evening sky. 

Unexpected Point, Florence SC

I love the light in this painting. It just glows with fall light raking across the horses and riders, glinting off the broom straw and buildings. 

You can still see these broom sedge fields with tall pines and rickety old buildings slowly crumbling to the ground. And yes they still hunt for quail and dove in  the south. 

Ttyl Margaret xoxoxo off for another busy day.