I am an artist in Spruce Pine, NC. Originally from Birmingham, AL, I have worked for decades as a ceramic and multimedia artist. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, I began oil painting.
Appalachian Wasteland
The story of a painting born from wreckage and reckoning.
It was just after Halloween when the streets of Spruce Pine still smelled like river silt and gasoline. I was on Lower Street five or six days a week, usually for seven hours at a time—cleaning, mopping, shoveling mud, handing out food and water, making coffee, bleaching every surface I could find. I was organizing volunteers, chasing down donations, listening to people’s stories, trying to keep the gears turning in a town that had been gutted by Hurricane Helene.
Everyone was doing their best. And by “best,” I mean surviving. I hadn’t had power or water at home in 28 days.
One afternoon, Michael—a friend and local Presbyterian pastor—came by to drop off some generators. He looked me in the eye and asked, “How are you doing now?”
“I’m fine,” I said automatically.
He tilted his head. “Do you have power?”
“No.”
“Water?”
“No.”
He gave me a look that said he saw straight through the mask. Then he said something that stuck with me: “You’re doing what you get frustrated about in other people—you’re pretending you’re okay.”
He was right. I was staying busy so I didn’t have to feel the weight of what had happened. The grief wasn’t just mine. It was collective. Towns ruined, homes destroyed, livelihoods gone. Timber fields wiped out. People missing. Entire communities disconnected. And it wasn’t just Spruce Pine. It was the entire region.
Around the same time, my boss at the nonprofit told me I needed to take a break—really take one. Rest. Process. Heal. I had recently secured a subsidized studio space, one I shared with a tea maker. It had been years since I’d had a proper studio, and I hadn’t done much with it yet. I’d been too busy trying to keep everyone else afloat.
But now I had no excuse. So I went to the studio.
My friend Anita had given me a stash of oil paints and old canvases—gifts from someone who had painted bright, vivid flowers on nearly every inch. I didn’t feel like painting flowers. I didn’t feel like painting anything, really. But I opened the tubes, started smearing paint over the blossoms. Wiping. Scraping. Layering over beauty with raw emotion. It wasn’t precise. It wasn’t planned. I’d work on one, then another. Let something dry, then scrub it back off again. I was angry. I was exhausted. I was scared. And all of that poured onto the canvas.
That’s when Appalachian Wasteland came out of me.
The colors, the textures—it was a map of feeling more than of place. A kind of internal terrain, laid out in oil and motion. As I painted, I found myself thinking of Anna, a new friend who lived in the Pensacola area of Yancey County. The storm had devastated that region too. No phones. No internet. If you wanted to know if someone was alive, you had to physically go find them. And Anna lived across a little bridge I wasn’t sure even existed anymore.
So I painted for her. For all of us. For the lost bridges and unanswered messages and the helplessness of being cut off. For the things we couldn’t save and the feelings we weren’t ready to face.
Appalachian Wasteland wasn’t just a painting. It was what came out when there was nothing left to hold back. When the storm had stripped everything bare—including me—and all I could do was try to make something from the wreckage.