I love doing paintings of old barns, and it was time I did an icon - a “See Rock City” barn. For over 80 years, “See Rock City” barns have dotted the rural landscape. Bold lettering on the sides and roofs of country barns on two-lane rural roads invited visitors to a Chattanooga TN tourist attraction, a marketing idea of Rock City founder Garnet Carter.
When he retired in 1969, Clark Byers, a self-taught painter and advertising firm employee, had painted Rock City messages on nearly 900 barns in 19 states (from Michigan to Texas to North Carolina) over a period of 30+ years. Today only about 70 of these memorable barn billboards remain, mostly in Tennessee, where the historic structures have been named historic landmarks.
I created this painting of a See Rock City barn which still stands on US Hwy 11 (2550 Lee Hwy) on the south side of Sweetwater TN. Many of the old barns I’ve painted have decayed, fallen down or been demolished, so I’m happy that I have been able to capture and preserve their images in my art. The fame of Rock City barns has helped save them as symbols of Americana, and I am delighted to honor this one in a scratchboard painting.
Scratchbord™ is an ideal surface for depicting textures, and rustic barn wood has become one of my favorite scratchboarding subjects. I struggled a bit, trying to decide if I should create a day or night scene. It is very challenging to create a large area of a uniform grey value on scratchboards, so, if a day scene, I’d probably need to make less sky (framing it with trees close to the viewer) or make it cloudy. I decided that a night scene would not only be more dramatic but easier and more fun to depict on the black surface! The positioning of the moon in the top left corner would help balance my composition. I'd just use a crescent moon, which would look appropriate with the lighting from the left.
From many reference photos I took in morning light in late winter, I chose one that highlighted the painted end of the barn, while also showing some of the side and the metal roof. In Photoshop, I removed a tall pole leaning on the front of the barn, corrected the perspective distortion, lightened the dark areas, and converted the image to black and white. I traced guidelines from the photo onto my 8”x10” Scratchbord™ panel using Saral graphite transfer paper and began my scratching with the barn's lettering.
My photos of the work in process show how I continued with scratching the barn details, then the foreground, the tall tree, and, finally, the night sky. For the sliver of a moon, I used a circle template, scratching a solid white edge and making more random and smaller marks on the inner edge. The tiny white marks for the stars were created by using Ampersand's scratchboard Knife tool, spinning it in a circle on the black surface.
In my final steps, I scratched the slanted roof to make it look more lit by the moonlight and scratched over the lettering again to lighten and better emphasize the words. I used Ampersand Art’s Repair Black ink, full strength, to create stronger shadows on the front side of the structure. I thinned the black ink with water to slightly tint the side of the barn, since I had scratched it too light.
If you can’t visit this barn in person, take a look at a really cool panorama of photos of this Rock City Barn online. And keep an eye out for the few remaining See Rock City barns!
