Mary Belcher "The Artist" Rock Creek Park

There are many reason "WHY" I took years out of my life to write about the folk that exhibit at Eastern Market.  The infinite fatigue of the visible being made to seem invisible.  The inability of folk to put together the picture...because it is too complexly beautifully diverse ....

Last weekend Mary Belcher came by my booth  - she wanted me to see something.  Now I want you to see something.   What makes a community...who maps the details of its diversity...

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                                                  The Danger of a Single Story

http://turtleswebbmyviewfromhere.blogspot.com/2011/08/danger-of-single-story-turtles-webb.html
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/lifestyle/magazine/rock-creek/

MARY BELCHER

The Artist

She painted the illustrated park map and other D.C. scenes

Nearly every weekend, Mary Belcher sets up a booth at Eastern Market and sells prints of her paintings of Washington scenes. When visitors spot a tall illustrated map of Rock Creek Park, they linger, looking for familiar spots.

“I can tell when people are from the suburbs,” she says. “They say, ‘Oh, look. It’s a map of Rock Creek Parkway.’ ”

Belcher, 62, moved to Washington in 1970 from Ohio. In exploring the park, she soon found what she calls her “power spots”: settings with striking natural beauty (Pulpit Rock) or historical resonance (the former site of Blagden Mill). She also got involved with efforts to protect a historic cemetery that lay partially on parkland, sparring occasionally, she says, with the National Park Service. Today, she can see the park’s treetops from her home studio in Adams Morgan.

The map project began in 2001. It was born out of her frustration with traditional maps: “boring, flat things that didn’t really give you a sense of the experience.”

Courtesy of Mary Belcher

To guide her painting, Belcher consulted an 1866 map by Maj. Nathaniel Michler of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Congress had directed him to scout locations for a public park and a new executive mansion, far from the stench and heat of the city’s core. Michler’s renderings of the Rock Creek valley — a “wild and romantic tract of country,” he wrote — were the beginning of a nearly 25-year effort to create the park. Belcher sells the map for $395 framed, $300 unframed.

Her artistic project is ongoing. There are thousands of other sites in the park she’d like to paint. But capturing those scenes will be a challenge.

“There’s four borders on the picture,” Belcher says. “The park is a 360-degree experience.”

— Libby Sander

On the map: Prehistoric stone quarries, which Belcher notes on her map, were discovered along the steep banks of Piney Branch in the 19th century.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/lifestyle/magazine/rock-creek/