A Creative Place To Call Home

March 07 2008 by Gordon Jameson

My wife and I first visited North Carolina in 1991 while on vacation. There was something special in the air that made us decide if we ever left California, North Carolina felt like a good destination.

Two- years later we sold our house in Los Angeles, put everything in storage and headed east. We stayed in a friend’s house in Winston-Salem and one day someone told us to check out Chapel Hill. I remember driving down Franklin Street in the historic part of town on a fine day and thinking, “I’m home.”

We stayed the weekend, found an apartment and made plans to have our belongings shipped from LA. Within a year, we had found our wonderful home in the country near Hillsborough where we plan to stay.

We’ve lived in Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. I find the challenges associated with being an artist remain pretty much the same no matter where one lives so it’s best to live in a place you love and that nurtures the creative process—and then deal with the details from there.

There is a vibrant and accessible art community here that I enjoy being part of. The colleges and universities in the area foster a cosmopolitan atmosphere within the context of a small town feeling. I love running into people I know around town and having the check-out person in Weaver Street Market, for example, know me by my first name.

My wife, Bonnie, is the CFO for a venture capital firm in Durham, our neighboring community. Their offices are in the new American Tobacco Campus which has helped spark the revitalization of downtown Durham. In the years since we became natives-by-choice, we have seen the communities grow mostly for the better. We have never regretted coming “home” to North Carolina.

Please check my Website (http://www.gordonjameson.com) to see my work and a five-minute artist profile video by local film producer Nic Beery.