Artist’s Statement: This work is based on the Mill River disaster, of 1874, which killed 140 people in the towns of Williamsburg, Haydenville and Leeds Massachusetts.
I live on that same river and have watched it, listened to it, and painted it over the years. But after reading Elizabeth Sharpe’s In the Shadow of the Dam, a carefully and beautifully documented account of the flood, I began to think l about making art about this tragic event. Tragic on two levels: that of man versus nature, but also that of man versus man, since it was shoddy construction, condoned by greedy mill owners, that caused the deaths of so many innocent people.
