$630

Robert Dodd

Exhibition: Waterworks Exhibition 2024 Entry Form

Painting Width: 12.0

Painting Height: 16.0

Medium: Watercolor

The North State Recreation Area, a new Veterans Memorial site, is located in Sedro-Woolley, WA and was originally part of a Mental Health Facility constructed circa 1910. The place has a dark and dubious history that includes an adjacent cemetery with approximately 1500 grave sites, of which nearly 1000 are unmarked. Residents who passed on, while patients or inmates at the hospital, were interred here without ceremony. Many of the original farming facilities are scattered around the recreation site and include a milking shed, several barns, a silo and a mixture of ancillary structures in varying degrees of dilapidation. I used my own photo of the “Tree with Silo and Barns” for my painting and my composition is perhaps a metaphor for the site’s nefarious history, and hopefully suggests the possibility of hope and light for the families of the past residents.