Blue Jay and Fiddle

Joe Liles, standing next to the cupola on top of Watts Hall.

Blue Jay and Fiddle

1978

This was my first signed-and-numbered screenprint. I did it in my new printmaking studio in the basement of a very old farmhouse. This deserves a bit of explanation. I had moved back to North Carolina from my first art teaching job in Minnesota. I was living on an 110 acre farm between Durham and Chapel Hill. I had been hired by the Danziger Corporation of Chapel Hill to restore the 1840s farmhouse on the property and turn it into a museum. The pastures of the farm were to be turned into a place of outdoor music festivals, and the old barn was to be an artists’ studio space and marketplace for the community. All of this grand plan did not materialize. The Danziger Corporation put their “Boulevard Farm” project on hold because the money making restaurants of the Corporations were in financial trouble. I was asked to come into Chapel Hill and help two of the restaurants get back on their feet. I could still live on the farm and work gradually on the original mission of restoring the place.
I originally created the “Bluejay and Fiddle” artwork to use as a poster to promote a concert in the large back room of one of my Chapel Hill restaurants, The Ranch House. The concert was for The Red Clay Ramblers, a well known bluegrass, oldtime, and original music group. The fiddle was a prominent instrument in their ensemble, and the bluejay seemed to me to be a good fit for the Southern roots of the group. The concert was a rousing success with an audience of well over 100. I enlarged the artwork and turned it into a screenprint, printing the blue ink through a stencil on a silk screen. Working in my spare time over the next month, I produced four more prints in my Boulevard Farm studio.