When artist Gordon Jameson and wife Bonnie saw their future home on Dairyland Road, it was a plain house with no landscaping. “It felt like an old house in the beginning of its life.” The barn out back, with a dirt floor and no windows, sold him on the place. First he made it useable, then he made it comfortable. That barn is now his studio, where he arranges oil paints with reverence, acrylics with respect, and magazines with style. Maple View Farms is so close that he and Bonnie have a must-walk-there rule (with loopholes for darkness and tall grass). After he left a card introducing himself as a neighbor, Maple View commissioned Gordon to illustrate their ice cream carton.
Gordon is one of the seven founding member artists of the non-profit Frank Gallery in Chapel Hill; he served six years as Board chair. He notes that Frank became a reality because artists, governments, and businesses were “all on the same page… Arts are good for the economic bottom line of a community.”