a pictpaints ure A THOUSAND WORDS PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRENNA KNEISS
Each spring, the area from Mexico Beach to Carrabelle, Florida, plays host to over a hundred artists who travel there for the Forgotten Coast en Plein Air (also known as America’s Great Paint-Out) and the Plein Air South conference. Their subjects have included the gorgeous coastal landscapes and wildlife, the area’s charming homes, inns, and businesses, and even the local people. This year, some of the artists were no doubt concerned about what they might find since Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm, ripped across the Florida Panhandle on October 10 last year. The devastating hurricane made landfall directly on the small town of Mexico Beach and wiped out nearly all the homes and businesses there, but it was not the only 2018 disaster that affected the one-hundred-mile region nicknamed the Forgotten Coast. A controlled burn turned into a wildfire and destroyed thirty-six homes and eight hundred acres last June in and around the community of Eastpoint, just across the bay from Apalachicola. These two major events drastically changed the 80 | SE P T E MBE R 2019
landscape that participants in the Forgotten Coast en Plein Air had come to know and love. Still, that might have made the fourteenth annual paint-out the most significant one to date.
