Somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line the true South exists, wedged between the realities and the sentiments of life embedded in popular consciousness with all the passionate longing that the play of moonlight on magnolias and the stern lessons of racial conflict evoke.

The cultural historian Estill Curtis Pennington has drawn together prevailing ideas on southern art, lifestyle, and literature to capture the spirit of a place that "yearns to remember, to recall, to reflect." Against this cultural backdrop he rests canvases washed with the light of southern skies and drawn with the hand of generations of southern imagination

A native of Kentucky, Estill Curtis Pennington is the author of several articles and exhibition catalogs dealing with southern art. After holding positions at the Smithsonian Institution, the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Mississippi, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, Pennington now lives in Bourbon County, Kentucky.