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In 1991, my neighbor John Ehrenhard, director of the Southeast Archeological Center (SEAC), approached me about doing a painting for the National Park Service. At the time, I was working as a commercial illustrator and portrait artist. I approached the job as if it were any other assignment, but the subject matter was signi¤cantly different from what I was used to. The scene was to illustrate presumed domestic day-to-day activities at a Late Archaic site in Georgia on the Savannah River. This site, known as Sara’s Ridge, was part of the land that was covered with water as a result of the Richard B. Russell Dam project. I was excited at the chance to paint a scene of such interest, but, I must admit, I felt somewhat apprehensive about working with archaeologists. Until that time, I had done most of my work for advertising clients and art directors. As dif¤cult as those folks could be to work with, they at least had a history of working with artists and photographers on a regular basis. I wasn’t sure if the collaboration between scientist and artist would produce a pleasing work of art. In the back of my mind, I could see perhaps an overemphasis on artifacts and details that might interfere with creativity. My concerns were not to be realized, though, as the project went over extremely well. The archaeologists were thrilled to see “their site” come to vivid life. The archaeologist in charge of that site even told me that my painting was just as he had imagined it and that it looked as if I had actually been there myself. The success of this painting was to set the tone in many ways for a continuing series of paintings of various subjects and time periods. In the Sara’s Ridge painting (plate 2), it was my hope that the viewer would be not only an observer of the scene but a participant as well. The main character , a women heating stones in a ¤re, turns to look at you with somewhat of a scowl, saying perhaps, “Don’t you have anything better to do?” The painting, along with other illustrations and photographs, was used in the book Beneath 4 / Archaeology in Two Dimensions The Artist’s Perspective Martin Pate These Waters by Sharon Kane and Richard Keeton and as the image on South Carolina’s Archaeology Week poster in 1992. Working one-on-one with the archaeologists, park rangers, SEAC personnel , and others involved with these projects has been a pleasure and an education . They do an outstanding job of informing me as to what it is they want depicted. At the same time, they are usually very open to artistic viewpoints. I have been asked on several occasions what I think about when I am working. When I was in art school, an instructor asked me abruptly in the middle of an assignment what I was thinking about at that moment. I realized that I couldn’t answer the question. I was totally unaware of what I had been thinking about just a moment before. Later I found out that this is not uncommon with creative activity and that during the process of creating art the brain has a way of picking up what it needs to, such as someone asking you a question or a telephone ringing, but otherwise seems to operate in more of a subconscious mode. With the work I have done for the National Park Service, however , things seem to be different. I often ¤nd myself thinking about the time and place I am trying to portray. I try to imagine myself in the scene and living among the inhabitants. What would I see? What would it smell like? What would I be hearing? What would my daily needs be? What would those needs require me to do? For all but a few paintings, there are no photographs of what this place would look like—I have to take the information given to me and then use my imagination to create the scene. I often think of it as “mental time travel.” Many of the projects that I have worked on combine the visual image with well-written text that students, teachers, and others can understand. Along with good creative writing, visual imagery is critical in getting this information across to the public. In many ways I consider myself a member of the general public, and perhaps this...

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