By
Ed Cahill
Piece description from the artist
A view from the bridge that crosses the Chattahoochee river near the intersection of GA Hwy 75 and the Unicoi Turnpike. This beautiful and ancient valley, called Sautee Nacoochee, was once the home of prehistoric mound building indians . Built in 10,000 BC the legend of the mound (on the far left of the painting) goes that Sautee: a Choctaw brave had a forbidden love with a lovely young Cherokee princess named Nacoochee (which translated means “The Evening Star”). The two ran away with each other and hid on the slope of Mount Yonah. A Cherokee search party found them, and Nacoochee`s father ordered Sautee thrown off the face of the mountain. Seconds after Sautee was thrown from the mountain, Nacoochee flung herself after him, refusing to live without her love. The two lovers were buried together in the large mound. The area is now named after the two. It is said if you desecrate or even tread on the mound, bad fortune will come to you from Indian spirits. I hope painting it does not count.
Ed Cahill's interest and inspiration swings from wondrous landscape and quiet woodland streams, to whirling moonlight evenings on crowded expressways. Born in Wisconsin, he was raised in Ohio and encouraged by his artistic mother at an early age. Ed taught himself to paint first with tempera, then acrylic and finally oil. After a formal B.F.A. education at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh he entered into a commercial art career in graphics and art direction. Ed now owns and operates his own ad agency near Atlanta.
Inspiration and preparation are entwined in much of Ed's art. Most of his landscapes start with a "plein-air":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plein_air painting and progress through sketches and intense planning into something more. Ed describes it as a need to express the wonder that he feels. What is hard is filtering out the unimportant things to eventually come up with the intended feeling. Most would call his work realistic, but he brands it romantic. He doesn’t try to duplicate nature exactly, rather he accepts the limitations of the human hand and eye skill and appreciates the joy and angst it reveals. The work is mostly about sensation, standing at the edge of the woods and looking out over a beautiful sunlit valley or sitting on the beach and smelling the sea while beautiful clouds build in the air and a shrimp boat passes by trailing a flock of gulls. It’s the feeling that’s important to Ed and occasionally he's lucky enough to get it right.
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