Walking the Dog: War Story
Date Posted:
3/19/2021 6:43:52 PM
Info Updated:
3/19/2021 8:13:12 PM
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WalkingtheDogCBresizedmed.jpg
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This painting is a war story.
On February 27, 2017, a few months after leaving government, I drove from my home in northern Virginia to the Cedar Creek battlefield in the Shenandoah Valley. There I stood at the top of a field and surveyed the spot where a great great grandfather on my father's side, Addison Cook, died on October 19, 1864. Addison was serving in Battery D of the 1st PA light artillery at the Battle of Cedar Creek. Battery D was part of the defense of the far left of the Union line. He died when it was overwhelmed in a predawn attack by Confederate forces.
I shuddered looking down at the now-peaceful scene -- at the wide field and rolling Virginia hills, at the house and barn that mask the spot where the Confederates forded Cedar Creek, at the more distant trees beyond which Cedar Creek joins the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. The field was alive with ghosts. One survivor of the battle, who lay wounded on this very field much of the day as the fighting swept past, recalled years later being "surrounded by about 70 or more dead and wounded men, some in severe agony." One of those men was my great great grandfather. He and the other casualties of Battery D died defending their pieces in hand-to-hand fighting, likely bayoneted or clubbed to death with muskets.
The sight of that field has haunted me ever since. I tried to exorcise it by painting it. First, I did a straightforward 12 x 9 rendition of the field itself. This is my "Field of War" painting, which my son now owns. It can be viewed among the Archived Works on my daviddpearce.com website and is also available as a Geo Galleries fine art print. While it was a decent literal rendition of the field, it left me unsatisfied. I wanted to acknowledge somehow my great great grandfather's death. Not only that, a second great great grandfather, on my mother's side, was also at Cedar Creek that day -- Uranus Stacy of the 29th Maine, who survived, returned to Maine, and lived to the age of 86. So one ancestor died and another survived. I decided to commemorate this with a second painting of the field, with a blue underpainting of a live soldier holding a musket and a dead one in a trench lying as he fell. I called this painting "Field of Death". It can be viewed in the "Memory" collection of my website and is also available as a Geo Galleries print.
With all that, I still couldn't get the field out of my mind. So I did a very different third version. I kept the general shape of the field, as well as the house and barn in the distance. But I left out the background mountains, to keep the focus more squarely on the field. I moved the road that had been out of sight on the right to the middle of the composition. I rearranged the trees and added a figure walking a dog. No ghosts, no fighting. A peaceful scene.
Except for me it isn't.
The people who killed my great great grandfather came from behind that red barn.
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