Inspired by a personal connection to central Pennsylvania, an artist who lives in Shenandoah County, Virginia, is using her paintings to raise awareness and money to help clean up polluted sections of Moshannon Creek.
A couple of years ago, Sally Veach found out two of her pre-Civil War ancestors had leased their land in Clearfield and Centre counties for coal mining, which polluted the water there. She felt guilty.
“I started a project about a year ago that I wanted to do as an atonement acknowledging that my ancestor had something to do with this damage that's still happening right now,” Veach said.
Veach named her 11-painting exhibit “Yellow Boy: Ancestral Reckoning on the Red Moshannon.” “Yellow Boy” is a common term for the orangey-yellow mining sludge that gathers in contaminated waterways.
Veach used coal from an abandoned mine site and pigments made from the sludge to create her paintings.
The pigments were made by the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation. But in the future Veach plans to make her own paint from sludge she gathered from the Red Moshannon creek.
Her paintings depict the fish and bugs that conservationists are working to bring back to the polluted creek.
“If you can have brook trout, you have a very healthy stream,” Veach said. “But then the insects – the mayflies and the stoneflies that are in my work – those are the very important first indicator species that a stream has to have to support the rest of the chain of life.”
Veach is donating the proceeds of her exhibit to the Moshannon Creek Watershed Association, which works to clean up mining pollution in the waterway.
“Yellow Boy” runs through Oct. 12 at the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, but purchases can also be made on Veach’s website.
