OREGON TAYLOR FIELDS

  Years passed since events sealed Carls fate. He sat smoking a cigarette looking out from the window in a two story tenement on Morven St in Wadesboro. A blank lot adjoined the building, plenty of time to think about what could have been.  He was old now, but his size and strength once predominate still showed shadows of itself. He has acquired the nick name King Bird during a stint in jail for robbery. Carl duked it out with a security guard that was roughing up inmates for no reason. It bought him more time, but respect. Carl thought how ironic the Morven street name was. He had grown up in a town on the Pee Dee River named the same. The south was deep there. He’d heard all the stories local whites like to tell. How slave barges were brought all the way up the river from the coast. How the best slaves were always taken in the towns south of Morven. Prejudice leaves stains. Like a frame where you can change the picture but the frame is still there. A bitterness still burned ...

  I recently revisited a series of paintings I had done as an Ode to Etel Annan, a great painter who died in 2021. Her paintings followed no rules. Mountains were purple, sky’s yellow and meadows red. The sun never quite right. Somehow Annan grew to understand the world can be what you want it to be. Reminding me, that I could too…

  I always wanted to photograph in winter, trying to capture its special light and color. The hidden places of the season. The mountains, meadows and trees had so much to say from their summer and fall. That my camera could not capture it all...