Wadley is a railroad stop and oversized lumber camp between Louisville and Harlem, where Oliver Hardy was born. It does not, however, look prosperous, particularly after Louisville, which might be described, in terms of mood and appearance, as slow but steady. It doesn’t really have a bad part, just a part that isn’t quite up to the good. Wadley is mostly bad, and it would be disingenuous to make any bones about it.

No painter should care for any subject to pass the Better Homes and Gardens test – or even emerge from aesthetic Chapter Eleven. To second-guess nature – at least on the picture plane – is to start off with an apology. If you are attracted to the ends-of-the-earth, so be it. It is as good a choice as any. It’s what you do with it that seems to matter more over time than in the present. Unless you have the most discerning audience in the world – in which case: who are they? And you could possibly introduce us?

Driving through Wadley for the first time, I was struck by an inactivity most people associate with the twilight hours of the day, when people have closed up shop and gone home, or to a neighborhood restaurant. Its main street – bellwether of a town’s prosperity – was, at best, provisional. Store windows needed to freshen up their displays – or had none; foot-traffic was of the surreptitious variety, scurrying away from places rather than toward them; automobiles seemed to begrudge traffic lights, as if to say: “Why bother in a town that wouldn’t notice if you gunned through it at seventy miles per hour?”

Louisville has a sociable quality about it that is nowhere to be seen in Wadley. If anything distinguishes it between the dried-up little towns I have explored in the past, it’s a possibly greater degree of mean-ness in a county that is not overrun with beautiful places. Here as elsewhere, I was drawn to a mini-landmark that had, at one time, provided comfort and connection – a place to land between places. People came here for to spend a few dollars on gas, purchase a pack of chewing gum, lay about for the latest gossip. Like much of the town, human life has abandoned it so completely that plant and animal forms take up the slack and like it. The romantic landscape painter who roamed the English countryside found his ruins and rang melancholy changes on the theme of Lost Potential or Brooding Desolation. His, and sometimes her, sensibility was informed by the dawn of a revolution that would transform Old England – and the world – with pitchy fires and throbbing explosions. I think I understand such people, who felt they were at a crossroads. Fearing change, they leapt into the cauldron of the past; embracing life, however, they wanted to record complex feelings that stemmed partly from nostalgia and partly from sheerest terror: of the unknown, of their own damnable potential, of life, death, limbo, lack of sales. Luckily, the romantics were wildly popular. Turner started out as one and, had he kept at it, he probably wouldn’t have been able to churn out pictures of ruined abbeys fast enough. Artists can be prophets, but the luckiest among them are no more than a few weeks ahead of their times.

At any rate, I think I approached this subject with similar feelings, compounded by my horror of the coruscating emptiness of the town itself. I painted the picture in an open field, where I was visited by the kinds of people who often trudge through them – who are generally people with no other place to go. They were, to a man and woman, polite and deferential – I might even say pleased to see that I was there. But they were like the place itself. Life had passed them by and they had become hosts, not to invasive plants and animals, but to addictions and compulsions; to idle behaviors; to self-destructive binges and law-bending toots. None of these apparent vagrants asked me for money, as many do in Richmond and DC. I might have represented something hopeful and dramatic, an exciting development such as they rarely experience cold sober. Some visited as many as three or four times, checking on my progress, making small talk about the weather, wondering why it was that I’d want to paint something like that old gas station. The implication being that I could go to more interesting places and stay in them. I could get away, in which case: why in Jesus’ name would I want to be here?