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The

Covered Bridges

Home Page.

A Project by Yours Truly, me.

Click here to go to the Covered Bridge Table of Contents.

Any input? Click here to go to the feedback page.

Here's a look at some of the presentations in this section:

• "The Bridges of New Hampshire", a romance.   How I met my wife.  

• Full Size Galleries of the Covered Bridges of New Hampshire (original drawings or photography enhanced by digital art techniques):

  •  New Hampshire Covered Bridges, Gallery One:  page one, page two, page three, page four.

  • The Meriden Covered Bridge Gallery  Covered Bridge digital art based on a photo shoot of the Meriden Bridge.

• A look at the original artwork done in 1998.  The smaller drawings I did when I was recovering from the dislocation of my right arm:

  • Drawings of the Covered Bridges of New Hampshire.  A larger look at the original artwork.

  • The New Hampshire Covered Bridge Viewer.  A faster way to look at the original drawings.

  • The Covered Bridges of New Hampshire in the nickelodeon.    Detailed slow-loading photographs of the original drawings.

• Special Covered Bridge Pages:

  • The Blacksmith Covered Bridge.    

  • The Dingleton Hill Covered Bridge.  

   

Introduction:

"The Covered Bridges of New Hampshire"

or

"Encounter at the Half-Moon Café": 

For the moment, I've gotten as far as most of about fifty or more of the covered bridges in the state of New Hampshire, which I had intended to do as a series of paintings, an effort somewhat precluded due to a violent fall on a wet floor in the Half Moon Café on Pleasant Street in Claremont, so named after a governor's relative's estate in England, the estate of Lord Clare (why can't these guys ever come up with any original names!  how about "Whoopieville"? but no, it's always got to be new this or new that, almost cursing the locale to become the opposite of the place they're named after), said governor being in office when the city was established, several hundred years back, when they were still colonists.  

Claremont when I left it, was a clogged-up economic engine, a failing city, once extremely prosperous until the six sisters (the oil guys) tore up her railway.  A very complex issue indeed, which I intend to examine in the other sections of the site, such as the Economics section and the Cosmos section.  You see, it seems the oil guys were motivated by greed, but it may have been human instinct to recarbonize the biosphere.  That's the cosmos in that it is, if you will, the cosmological personality of the carbon cycle.  Where the economics comes in is in the oblivion mankind seems to have concerning the flow of commerce in economic engines.  That's discussed at the outset in my article, "The River of Wealth".  Claremont needs prosperity but resists it as well, much the same as the home owners (or hoe moaners) here in southern California and their prohibitive four-way stop signs still in place on major roadways because they fear "urbanization".  Somebody ought to "urbanize" their four-car driveways.  It's the classic you-become-what-you're-really-of syndrome.  Classic Jurassic, or dino-eyesore.    [economic engine link at page  bottom]

How I got started on this project was wild.  I had done the photo shoot in May of 1997 about a year before the café incident.  

First of all, I encountered the Newport Covered Bridge trying to find a shortcut from my workplace to the apartment I lived in before I bought my mobile home which I sold just a while ago to get back to California from where I hitch-hiked out to begin my voyages over thirty years ago in 1970.  It was brand new, but official since it was built the traditional way by bridge wrights, the cousins of the shipwrights who at one time built ships by memory, using poetry to remember the technology.  Another forgotten function of the humanities.

But then I got the mobile home in West Claremont, just as over half of the United States, who also live in "manufactured housing", with all it's accompanying unknown hazards such as fumes from the man-made stuff inside.  There is an antidote.  Plants, such as the one called "wandering Jew", filter out such hazardous elements in the air inside those structures, such as formaldehyde and fumes from modern adhesives that contain such things as cyanide.  Have them growing in numbers inside the unit using florescent lighting and interconnected slow drip watering systems.  

Anyway, it was back in 1997.  I knew I was getting nowhere trying to work for the establishment having to sell my labor as if it were some kind of max-nix item on the back shelves of some discount merchandiser's warehouse-style premises.  Constantly being jostled from a first to a second shift during a scheduled week, having no say in the matter if one wanted to keep the job, having hours scaled back during slow times, insufficient salary to meet the cost of living, returning home exhausted from unreasonable work loads, unable to, as the saying goes, "have a life", much less really being able to do little more than be a recreational hobbyist artist, the so-called "weekend painter".  

Well it finally came to the point where I had to step out and did.  But something happened to wreck my opportunity.  "The Encounter at the Half Moon Café".  

I was at last ready to start painting, having left my full-time menial job as a cart gatherer (I was always getting into trouble with the management as I had enough presence of mind to arbitrate for myself -- they were anti-union -- and, it seems versed in hostile psychology, incessantly trying to force me, to the determent of my health, to perform increasingly more labor in less time) One of the few jobs I could hold down as an overqualified person in an anti-human and indifferent job market, having to dip into credit to pay for the three thousand calories necessary to perform the horrendous physical activities they demanded of me on an ever increasing quota with the alternative something they no longer called "being fired", but now used the draconian term, "termination".

So the first thing I did was grab my camera and a back up camera, both thirty-five mil automatics, nothing fancy, also cursed with those infernal partial fish-eye lens, they don't give you a choice anymore, unless you use the more professional single lens reflex with a thousand dollar straight lens such as the ones the real estate agents use, so you're stuck with photos of tall things leaning inwards if on the edges of the picture.  Perhaps you can spot this on my sketches as I didn't want to fool around with what things might look like, I just did the art as if it were a sketch of the photo, not the actual scene.

Anyway, there I was trying to show the owner of the Half Moon Café my work which I had managed to reproduce on ceramics.  She was in the back, a nasty local and his girl friend blocking my way, I took the detour around some tables and that's where I slipped.  It was an unusually violent fall, or would have been, but I caught myself as down I went, business card in my left hand and a mug with a reproduction of my drawing of Claremont City Hall in my right.  Paper covers rock not floor, but mug lands on table.  So it was the right hand with the mug in it by the handle, and the right arm of the right hand that held the mug that broke the fall.

I probably would have been more seriously injured, but the injury incurred was still very bad: I had dislocated my shoulder and clavicle and severely sprained everything from my fingertips to my right hip.  I had lost the use of my right arm for almost anything but simple motions, and certainly lost the use of it for painting.  It was even painful to type.  So I resorted to painfully doing the covered bridges as miniature drawings at about three hours a drawing.  I've learned that no matter the hardship, something even better comes out of it.  That is, if you decide to persevere.

You can see that the artwork steadily improved as I got better at my newfound modus opperandai. 

I went on to the photo shoot of the Covered Bridges of Vermont, which took three weeks and I traveled three thousand miles around the state to do it, and, because the number of digital photos is virtually unlimited, that time I came back with a couple of thousand pictures.  Or, as I say, "picky, picky, picky!".  Next I want to do a photo shoot of the covered bridges of California, although the best thing to do would be to do the artwork right there in the open, an art technique they call "plein aire", used mostly by the Impressionists in the 19th century.  The problem is how to do it on a budget of totally broke.  Maybe I can budge it.

Click here to return to the Self Portrait With Hat page.  

Click here to return to "Flowers beside a New Hampshire Forest, Gallery Nine".

Click here to return to "The Economic Shadow" in the economics section.

Click here to go to the Paul Hall art home page.
Click here to go to the Discussions in Sociology home page, 
Click here to go to The Cosmos Subjects home page, Click here to go to Humor home page,
Click here to go to the Premonitions page, Click here to go to the Economics page,
Click here to go to the Poetry page, Click here to go to the Education page.

The entire website http://www.paulhallart.com, and in this instance, this unique section of said website, headed by this homepage, .../Covered Bridges/CoveredBridges.htmPaul A. L. Hall.

It's the wood.  There's something very special about the wood.