Historical Art Prints
I have a beautiful selection of historical art prints. Every painting I do has a story.
I hope you will take time to read about each one.
Click on each image for the details including price, size and story.
When you choose your perfect historical art prints, don’t forget that we do beautiful framing.
It will save you so much time running around. You will be able to hang your artwork as soon as it arrives!
My Historical Art Print Memories
As I sit here building this page about historical art prints and thinking about the paintings and prints that I have done, I realize that all history is memories. Some are just older than others. When looking at the historical art prints that are on this page, I noticed that each and every one held not just memories of mine but those of millions of other people too.
I remember the time when, at age seven or eight, my Mother and Daddy took me across the Rockford one lane low water bridge. When we got there, another car was coming across from the other side. It being a single lane bridge, we had to wait for them to cross. Then we had our turn. Bridge etiquette, you know! As we waited, Daddy said “If you are scared, see if you can hold your breath till we get to the other side. There’s a candy store over there.” Hey, he dangled that candy carrot in front of me. And, I was holding my breath before his foot hit the gas. It was a bumpy ride. My painting, called “The Bridge,” is my recollection of that momentous ride.
I can’t quite remember if I was able to hold my breath to the other side of that bridge. But, I definitely remember that old store. When we walked through that front door, there it was, a long wooden and glass counter with every section filled with CANDY! Mother said that my sister and I could each get one fourth of a pound of any combination. That was one of the hardest decisions that a little girl could make. I don’t remember exactly which kinds that I got. But, I do remember them all being some kind of chocolate. Yes even then, I was a young chocoholic. Besides the candy, the store was filled with all kinds of antiques including things that were new then. They are antiques now. This, the Rockford General Store, is featured in my limited edition print called “Nostalgic Rockford.”
The bridge that I spoke of crossed over the Yadkin River from Yadkin Co. to Surry Co. It is one of the longest rivers in NC flowing 215 miles leading to the fall line in Cheraw, South Carolina where it’s names changes to the Great Pee Dee. Oh my, I can’t begin to imagine the billions of historical memories that surround this river. My big memory of it started one Saturday morning in May of 1997. For a long time, many folks had ask me to do a painting of Pilot Mountain. I had seen so many paintings of the mountain and knew that if I would do one it needed to be different. Then one day, I remembered that at sometime I had seen a picture of the mountain on the front of the Winston Salem Journal. Someone had to have been standing right in the middle of the Yadkin River to have taken that picture. I was later talking to my friend, Malinda, and ask if she knew someone who could show me where that picture was taken. She said “My son. He’s been up and down that river many times since he was a child hunting and fishing.”
Two Saturday mornings after that conversation, I was climbing into a very small fishing boat with a trolling motor and my friends son Michael. Felix and Michael’s Mom pushed us into the river and away we went. It was a most beautiful adventure. As we quietly cruised down the river, we could only see and hear nature. There were turtles sunning on rocks, geese swimming in the water, fish jumping and deer standing on the banks of this beautiful place. Suddenly, out of the blue, I heard someone call out “Hey Michael.” It was a fishing buddy of Michael’s standing on the river bank doing what he does, fishing. It wasn’t long until Michael told me to get my camera ready. He pointed out that we were about to make a turn in the river and that we would soon be able to look back and and see the mountain. Sure enough, as we motored on around the turn, there it was Pilot Mountain. I started clicking the camera and the best shots were just as we came up to one of the islands in the river. There it was the very view that I had seen in the newspaper. No sooner than we saw the mountain, it was gone. My cruise down the big Yadkin river was coming to an end. Malinda and Felix were waiting for us at our stopping point. They helped us out of the water. We loaded the boat and the trip was over. Even though the photographs were taken in the spring time, I did the painting as a fall scene and released the prints the next October. I wanted to show off that mountain all decked out in Mother Nature’s fall colors and titled the painting and subsequent prints “The River.”
Over my thirty plus years of professional painting, I have done several paintings of Old Salem, North Carolina and reproduced prints from three of them. This is an historical Moravian village just outside of Winston Salem. The Moravians came to North Carolina from Pennsylvania and built Salem to be their central, economic, religious and administrative center for their Wachovia tract. This historic village has been visited and toured by millions of people looking to see and learn about it’s history. I am one of those people.
On May 5, 1989 a tornado came through Old Salem and wrecked the place. Century old trees of the village square were ripped from the ground. The beautiful Salem Square that had been painted previously by artists were done as the village was with all those glorious trees. It wasn’t long though before buildings had been repaired and young trees planted. In the spring of 1991 I returned to the village, that I had not seen myself for several years, with my camera. It was time to paint the new historic Old Salem as it was then after the storm. After all this is the way it would be remembered by a new generation. The square shaded by those enormous trees would never look the same at least in our life time. Over the next three years, I did three street scene paintings of this historical place releasing prints from them each fall for three years in a row. Those prints represent new historical memories. They are “Salem Radiance, ”Salem” and “Our Daily Bread” in that order. I hope that someday you can visit this peaceful little village and be able to compare my historical art prints of memories to Salem as it is now which will be your historic memories. The square shaded by these enormous trees would never look the same at least in our life time.
My very first historical art print was called “The Old Homeplace.” It featured an old house that was built in 1785 by Stephen Hobson II, a distant relative of my husband, Felix Hobson, and still stands on our property. I painted the piece back in 1989 and had prints made of it to sell to raise money to restore this old historic home. To be honest, I had never tried to market art prints before. I just naively thought that since I wanted to restore this old home that anyone who was a Hobson, related to the Hobsons or just a neighbor would certainly want to purchase a print to support the project. Needless to say, I was wrong. We did sell a few prints and were able to do some repairs to the place. Then the interest faded. We have, over the years, tried to keep the house from going into further disrepair and still apply all moneys to the house’s up keep. All sales of this print are greatly appreciated. I still have a dream of fully restoring this old plantation home back to it’s original glory.
It is obvious that “The Old Homeplace” is not my very best work. As my career blossomed, I put this painting and prints away and was embarrassed to even remind people of it. But now, I realize that it marks an historical point in the beginning of my professional art career. And now, I am proud to show and make it available to the public. This just goes to show that everything and every story becomes history once it is done. So, I hope that you enjoy my historical art prints.
All of the prints of any category that are available on this site have stories about the where, when and how details of each one. I do hope that you will take time to read about each of them. Maybe some of my pieces can spark some of your historical memories.
Patricia
I do hope that my artwork will spark some of your historical memories!
When you pick your perfect historical art prints, remember that we do beautiful framing.
It will save you so much time and energy. And, you will be able to hang your artwork as soon as it arrives.