Harpers Ferry, Below the Church
Medium: Watercolor on Paper
Date: c. 2008
A watercolor study of a narrow side street in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, observed beneath an overcast sky. The composition looks down the lane behind the town’s main street, where stone retaining walls, wooden stairways, and tightly spaced buildings create a layered architectural corridor. A shallow puddle in the foreground reflects the muted gray light, breaking the surface of the road and softening the strong perspective pulling the eye down the hill.
At its simplest, the painting is a study of place (stone, wood, water, and winter light) rendered in a restrained watercolor palette.
Process Notes:
This piece was painted from a photograph I had taken during a visit back to Harpers Ferry. Although the photograph itself was casual, the location carries a long personal history. The street sits just below the Catholic church and Jefferson Rock, one of the quieter passages that runs behind the more recognizable main thoroughfare of the town.
I grew up in Harpers Ferry and spent much of my childhood moving through these streets. My grandmother worked as a museum technician for the National Park Service, and many of my early memories involve walking between the buildings in this part of town while she worked nearby. Over time those childhood experiences layered with later visits as a teenager and adult, creating a deeply familiar sensory memory of the place, the texture of the stone walls, the worn wooden steps, the smell of damp earth after rain.
By the time this watercolor was painted, I had spent several years living away from the area. That distance made the landscape feel newly visible to me. I had begun photographing Harpers Ferry more frequently, partly out of a growing awareness of how strongly the surrounding hills, narrow streets, and river valley shaped my internal sense of orientation.
Technically, the painting was a quick studio study completed in a single sitting of roughly two hours. During this period I was experimenting with watercolor while teaching art classes at Monart School of Art, and there is a good chance the piece began as an exploration of ideas that might later translate into a classroom project.
The subject allowed for an interesting combination of structural and atmospheric elements. Watercolor handled the hard edges of architecture and stonework while also allowing softer passages in the sky, foliage, and wet ground. The puddle in the foreground, visible in the original photograph, became a small focal point where reflection and surface texture could be explored.
Several watercolor studies from this period share a similar approach, including other pieces drawn from personal photographs and memories of familiar places. Together they represent a period of experimentation with how different mediums might capture both the physical structure of a landscape and the sensory atmosphere attached to it.
This particular painting remains in the portfolio primarily as a record of that exploration, a straightforward study of observation, material, and memory anchored in a place that has shaped much of my visual life.
