The Dingleton Hill Covered
Bridge Drawing
(as seen from the roadside).
In the background sound that
should download in a couple of minutes,
that's me
on harmonica playing "Yellow Bird".
The area is full of wild finches and the males turn bright yellow in the summer.
If you whistle any music, the finches will imitate it almost immediately, but they don't use tempo so the melody is barely recognizable. It's a more "organic" form of the melody.
A note from the artist:
This was the first covered bridge I drew after I moved to New Hampshire. It was built in the 1800's as a bridge for school kids to get across a deep stream gorge. When I did the second study of this bridge I clambered down the steep embankment to shoot the photo I would later use for that composition and from that vantage point, I could get the sense of what I was searching for in that series: the 19th century function and it's geometry in wood as set in the environment of sylvan or urban contemporary New Hampshire.
Another view of the Dingleton Hill Covered
Bridge as seen from the mill stream underneath.
The bridge was built by a man who couldn't read or write and yet it was for students. I would liked to have been able to interview him or somehow dig up more information concerning the other bridges he built in the area. But there's no time. Even if the facts were still out there somewhere I can only give you here the shreds and bits I was able to gather on the way. That's one good thing about art and those who are truly enriched by it: art doesn't use a story; it sits separate and apart from literature with, of course, the usual exceptions such as illustration.
But as for this drawing, perhaps I should have called it "Discovery of the Dingleton Hill Covered Bridge". Because that's what happened and what led me to the rest of the covered bridge project. I was driving an aging Subaru between Claremont and Lebanon to get a card for my tape backup drive on one of my now obsolete computers, traveling along highway 12A which skirts the New Hampshire side of the lovely Connecticut River.
I noticed a sign about the presence of two covered bridges along the roadside. The sign also gave their numbers and that let me know there was a bunch more. A little research at the local library in Claremont (The Fiske Free Library) revealed over 50 covered bridges still intact throughout New Hampshire. That led me to the lengthy project to photograph and draw all these bridges. Later as time permits, I hope I can do a complete series of paintings of them.
Click here to see The Fiske Free Library drawing and other drawings I did of Claremont.
But as for this drawing, I sketched it from a photo I took on a subsequent shoot project of harvest time at the farms along highway 12A. There are some in particular that I was to draw from that series such as the old tractor with a flat tire, the hay gatherers and 12A cyclist and so on. So far this and the drawing of the Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge were the only two images done for that shoot.
I took the drawing to one of the local Claremont T-shirt guys for whom I did the artwork that appeared on the shirts of the Claremont High School basketball teams (I was trying to barter artwork for a t-shirt of one of my drawings "Performance", but that never panned out) and Don photographed it and asked me to put some shading in the photograph. It was for another project that never panned out either (I've got lots of those) but the photo with the shading hand-drawn in is the work you see in the "Oil Paintings" (etc) page. You can tell it from the original drawing because of the unrelated curve in the lower left corner.
There is a series of tertiary paved and unpaved roads that lead through the Dingleton Covered bridge, over Dingleton Hill, past the estate where the sculptor Saint Gaudens lived and worked in the 1800's and through the Meridan Covered Bridge. It's a lovely trip that takes a couple of hours. Someday I hope to do a landscape of the view of the Connecticut River from the top of Dingleton Hill.
Click here to return to "The Covered Bridges of New Hampshire".
Click here to return to the drawings from in and around Claremont, New Hampshire, page.
Click on the thumbnail to see the digital art used in the background of this
page, "Image104pastel1".
Click on any of the following to go there:
The Paul Hall literature directory
Covered Bridge table of contents
The Special page on the work "Performance"
More details on the Dingleton Hill Covered Bridge
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email address: art@paulhallart.com
...that's me
on harmonica playing "Yellow Bird".
The area is full of wild finches and the males turn bright yellow in the summer...