The Bend

The Bend is a series of open edition fine art prints with accompanying content aimed to help you design a space to escape. It is also a real and painterly place.

Escape to The Bend during your lunch, Pomodoro break, or mindfulness session. Check out the video to establish the setting. Please consider supporting my work by purchasing prints for your space.

Skip down to:
The Place (Video)
The Sounds
The Prints
The Colors
The Narrative

The Place (Video)

The Sounds

The Prints (Open Edition)

Click on an image below for ordering information.

The Colors

The Narrative

Nestled deep in the highland wilderness of West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains lies The Bend, a remote stretch of stream that feels like a world of its own. To get here, you have to leave the narrow gravel road behind and hike several miles downhill, descending straight into the heart of the valley.

Steep timbered walls tower above you. It’s autumn, and the valley is bathed in yellow and orange with quiet splashes of green—dominated by maples, yellow birch, red spruce, and mountain laurel.

The stream barrels down a straight stretch before hitting a large rock bar that has matured into a fully forested island. The water pivots right, cascading over a series of boulder-strewn step pools, curving left, left again, and back right as it makes its way around the island.

You have the place all to yourself…….there isn’t another person around for miles. The water is ice cold and refreshing. The sound of the stream dominates. It’s louder than a babbling brook, but softer than a roaring falls, the water plunges into deep pools with a constant chorus of splashes and trickles—almost as if the stream is explaining how it navigates the stone.

Up close, the water reflects the brilliant yellow valley walls and clear blue sky. Down in the deeper pools, it turns a rich red-orange, stained by tannins from newly fallen leaves. The rocks themselves are painted in crustose lichens, creating intricate mosaic patterns of orange, black, yellow, and gray—some matching the birch leaves almost perfectly.

Dragonflies patrol the banks on the hunt. Blue jays chatter in the canopy. Everywhere you look, the interplay of rock, water, leaves, and lichen offers an endless array of macro and micro compositions—little pockets of details to get lost in.

The lichens are fascinating. They completely carpet the rocks below the high-water line, growing edge-to-edge in respectful boundaries without overtaking one another. They’re a quiet partnership between two completely separate organisms…the fungus providing the physical structure and the algae harvesting sunlight for energy, both relying on each other to survive.

The Bend is a welcoming balance of rock and water, valley and sky, leaves and lichens, fungus and algae. There’s plenty to ponder out here as the sun drops behind the ridge, casting the valley in shadow and reminding you of the long, uphill hike that awaits.