These are some shots of my latest Four Dogs Tavern, in process. I’m still playing with the last one; the sky isn’t the way I want it, but I’m loving the glow of the candles in the windows!
Four Dogs Tavern. Oil on newspaper-covered canvas.
Christine Kerrick
I mentioned some people—artists—who inspire my art. Among the many other things that spur my creativity are places. Red Rock National Park in Nevada, with its powder-fine red sand; Paris in the spring; even the rolling, tree dotted hills from my hometown: all of them inspire me. And in that hometown is one of my favorite places:
The Four Dogs Tavern.
This isn’t a commercial or a review (although a review from me would be 5 out of 5 stars). I don’t know why this rustic 1800s building, with its wide-plank floors, textured stucco exterior and rich history as a wayfarers’ rest stop makes me want to paint it, but it does.
I think it goes deeper than its appearance or its award-winning crab cakes, flatbread pizza or 7-layer molten lava cake. It’s more than the craft beer, one of which is the Tavern’s name brand whose label bears various named homeless dogs you can adopt. It’s more than the way you feel when you sit out on the Four Dogs’ patio in back—dogs allowed and water bowls provided–on a crisp fall evening as the sun sets, clay chimenea in front of you crackling flames in its small mouth. All of these things make it feel like the only one of its kind.
And it is.
It is not a strip mall, or an online store or a chain store. Those have their place. This is a piece of history, and a place where I have great memories, even since childhood.
The Marshalton Inn, the restaurant which shares a parking lot and kitchen with the Four Dogs, has been around as itself longer than the Four Dogs Tavern. The Tavern started as a stable where travelers from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia (about 4 hours today in a car) stopped for food and ‘ale’ at the Inn. The two-lane road in front was the ‘I-95’ of its day.
With our present-day obsession with all things digital, food- and everything else-delivery and rushing through life, maybe the Four Dogs is a symbol of days gone by that we can still experience. While everyone else orders art supplies online (and sometimes I still do), I go into the city so I can feel the paper, smell the pencils and hey—maybe I’ll see something else there I ‘need’.
Aside from the previous restrictions, which made it necessary to pick up Four Dogs Tavern food, now it’s the same case there as with art supplies: nothing compares with being there. And if I can capture that warm feeling in a painting, even for myself, I’m happy.
