Artist and Culinary Lab Manager and Instructor Bronwen McCormick is no stranger to loss. The watercolor painter experienced the unexpected death of her husband in 2022. The sting of that loss temporarily halted her creative life including her painting practice. Having shown her landscape paintings earlier that year for the first time, she no longer felt driven to exhibit. Finally, in 2023, her spirit was rekindled, and she applied to the River Arts Marquee Gallery and was accepted. “I was excited because it meant a reclamation of my art practice,” she said.
Seven of McCormick’s paintings and twenty prints were on exhibit at the Marquee beginning in April of 2024. In September, when Helene hit, it turned the Marquee upside down, flooding it with waves nearly 25 feet high. McCormick lost her work in the devastating flood, along with nearly 300 other artists, antique dealers, and entrepreneurs. In the days after the storm, McCormick said, her artwork was the furthest thing from her mind.
“I was in survival mode: Where do we get water, where do we get food,” she said. “Then I saw photos of what had happened and the scope of the damage sunk in.”
For McCormick, who has worked in A-B Tech’s culinary department for fifteen years, grief cut deep. The hurricane, she said, hit both of her specialties- the city’s arts and culinary communities- hardest. To complicate matters further, September 27, 2024, the day of the hurricane was also the second anniversary of her husband’s death.
“It was hard to parcel out what [feelings] were from the hurricane and what was related to that,” she said.
Thankfully, there were daily meetings with neighbors in her Candler neighborhood to occupy and distract her. Each day at 3:00 p.m. as many as forty neighbors gathered to see who needed gas, food, or water. McCormick smiled, “ I quickly became the food and safety expert,” she said. “People would ask me [about refrigerator food] should I throw this away? Is it still good?”
As the days passed, she helped to empty walk-in freezers in the Magnolia building and brainstormed how to guide culinary students through the end of the semester without potable water on hand. Her paintings were temporarily forgotten. Then on October 14, 2024, McCormick got a phone call from the owner of the Marquee.
“She’d been digging through the rubble and found a painting with my name on it,” McCormick said. She promptly called a photographer friend of hers- Max Cooper- to come with her to pick it up.
“I thought he’d be interested in photographing the area,” she said. “I also was hoping to have him document me reclaiming the paintings.”
The paintings found were mountain sunsets in shades of orange and violet. When McCormick got to them, she found they were covered in hardened gray mud. The restoration process was slow and painstaking. It involved pulling each wooden frame with its hardware apart, removing the paintings, and cleaning them with bleach water. Surprisingly, she found the original colors slowly emerged from their covering of gray mud.
“The process of cleaning felt important to do,” she said. “[It] was a reclaiming of something back from the storm… [and] a tiny step towards restoration and recovery, if only for myself.”
“They were coated in wax,” She added. “That’s why they survived. Otherwise, because they’re watercolors they would’ve disappeared into the water.”
Ten weeks after the storm, the three landscapes sit at home in her studio. Aside from a tiny ding and some stubborn dirt, they look as tranquil as they did before the storm. Each has been marked on the back with the date of the hurricane and the date they were reclaimed.
“I don’t intend to sell them,” McCormick said. “They are a memento.”
McCormick, surprisingly, has already found a new home for her work. November 1, 2024, marked her opening at Asheville Gallery of Art where her paintings will remain on view for at least a year.
Recently, McCormick scrolled through photos of the Marquee on her phone. She reflected in the calm tone of someone well-practiced in the art of survival, “I was at the Marquee…I did what I wanted to do. I sold some of my work. That feels good. The paintings I lost were small in comparison to what others lost. I didn’t lose my way of making a living or lose my studio or my house. My paintings are just paper and wood.”
See Bronwen and her work at Asheville Gallery of Art (82 Patton Ave) at an opening reception "The Land Speaks" at on January 3 from 5 p.m.-7:30 p.m. She will be featuring with two other artists.
The photo above was taken by Max Cooper of Max Cooper Photography.
The photos below are of McCormick's paintings when they were found after the storm and after she restored them.
The photo of the mask inside the Marquee, taken by Max Cooper, shows the flood line at the bottom of how high the water rose.
