Chester County Archives | Carol L. Douglas

As with every cold, my current one is the worst that any person has ever endured.

Brandywine Morning, by Carol L. Douglas. It’s a sign of my mental state that I forgot to photograph it out of the frame.

Marshalton, PA is a quaint, charming hamlet of Revolutionary War vintage located in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Last night I had a brief, telling conversation at the historic Marshalton Inn while handing in my daily paintings for Plein Air Brandywine Valley.

“You could kill yourself crossing that street at rush hour,” I mused.

“Everyone’s cell phone constantly reroutes them onto the fastest route,” said a man named Lyle. “All these local roads get a lot more traffic now.”

My cell phone certainly agrees with him. Each day, it takes me on a different path through winding bottomlands from Newark, DE to West Chester, PA. I’ve seen at least a million miles of this countryside in the dark. It’s a lesson in patience.

There’s some unusual traffic. I followed a propane truck across a one-lane bridge yesterday morning, learning the etiquette of beeping before trying the blind hill. He had more reason than me to be there; he eventually stopped to make a delivery. Last night I followed an eighteen-wheeler going cross-lots. On Monday, there was a delivery van which weaved and started and stopped, making me wonder if its driver was impaired. Eventually, I overtook him and realized he was watching a video screen.

Beautiful Revolutionary War era hamlets and traffic everywhere.

I don’t condone impaired driving, but I can see how these roads could make a person careless. My ‘commute’ this week is about 25 miles. Yesterday it took almost an hour and a half.

Route 1 wanders through here, but bears little resemblance to the chirpy commercial road on which I live in Maine. There my son walks across the street to his summer job. Here, it’s a four-lane highway resolutely plugging through the suburbs.

I’ve lived my life in the quiet backwaters of the northeast, where population is stable. I don’t spend much time in the urban circus that stretches from Philadelphia to Washington, DC. Why do we think we need more people in America when so many of them have to live like this? No amount of shopping or fine dining could compensate for the loss of quiet they endure on a daily basis.

Blacksmith shop, by Carol L. Douglas. My two-hour Quick Draw.

Meanwhile, I’m struggling at this event. Handing in my work, I notice a stupendous street scene by Alison Menke and a beautiful, stylish house by Mick McAndrews. Suddenly everything I’ve painted seems weighty and old. Perhaps that’s because I’m feeling weighty and old myself. My cold is in full bloom.

I’m pounding zinc lozenges every three hours. These promise to reduce either the severity or the length of my cold by 28%—I can’t really remember which—if dissolved on the tongue starting at the first sign of a cold. I haven’t noticed much difference; as with every cold, my current one is the worst that any person has ever endured. But I keep going; after all, I’d be just as miserable not painting, and at least I’ll have something to show for it at the end of the week.

The coldest winter day I ever painted in Maine was actually in the Brandywine valley in October.

Morning Flight Path, 16X12, by Carol L. Douglas.

I’m at Brandywine Plein Air. We must paint in specific venues each day. That’s a good thing. Chester County, Pennsylvania is historic and hilly, and has no two roads that run in the same direction. I’d spend the whole week lost were it not for good navigation points.

We also must hand in no more than three paintings a day, but are expected to produce between four and ten over four days. This is a clever rule. It prevents an onslaught of paintings at the last minute, which then must be labeled and merchanidized by the organizers. It also stops the artist from endless dithering at the last minute. “Set it and forget it,” as the Ronco rotisserie adsonce famously said.

Of course, handing off paintings at a designated site requires more driving through the maze of Brandywine roads. I’m not sure this event was doable before the advent of cell phones.

It was cold, dark and miserable. On the rare moments the sky appeared, I rushed to add it.

The proper cure for a head cold is the “two-hat cure,” wherein one lies on one’s four-poster bed consuming Hot Toddies until the hat on the footpost morphs into two. (I got that directly from my doctor, by the way.) Instead, I’m dosing myself with Zicamand shivering in the wind. I should have stopped at CVS and bought Depends before I started coughing. If I weren’t 600 miles from home I’d have quit and gone to bed. On the road there’s no choice but to paint.

Enter Bruce McMillan, a fellow Mainer with an oversized Icelandic sweater and an exuberant personality to match. Without him, I might have died of grumpiness yesterday. I found myself kvetching about the light, the wind, and my lousy painting. He smiled and opened his arms as if to embrace the entire world, yelling into the wind, “What? It’s beautiful here!” He’s right, of course, and it didn’t take much to jolly me back into loving my life.

Blustery day, 12X16, by Carol L. Douglas. Same hedgerow, different angle. The black walnuts always lose their leaves first.

Still, I was—as Brad Marshall so memorably once said—“flailing around.” I texted my first painting to Bobbi Heath at noon, with the note, “crap composition, no focal point. It’s not inaccurate, it’s just ugly.” Well, days like this happen, and the only answer is to get up the next morning and do it again, only better this time. So here I go.

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Category: Chester County

Plodding, one foot in front of the other

The first day is always the hardest