Engraving made from a sharecropper's door, built in 1894.When Aaron Hequembourg needs art supplies to create his mixed-media engraved paintings, he doesn't go to the Sam Flax store. He walks outside his 193-year-old plantation house near Monticello and begins dismantling the dilapidated buildings — sharecropper and slave quarters, gin mills and trading posts — that still stand on the 2,000-acre farm he calls home.In addition to the aged, hand-hewn planks of wood that provide the canvases for his work, Hequembourg has uncovered old toys, newspapers, medicine bottles and a rotted peach in a Mason jar, evidence of a previous generation's recipe for peach brandy. These finds become the components in his artwork that is part art, part history.
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