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a simpler life in order to do her best work. 

Buchanan also admits to other than artistic considerations. She had been supporting herself by working fulltime as a Health Educator for the city of East Orange--then working late into the night and all week-end at her art, often working with with very heavy materials. She was almost forty, time was passing, and she needed to save her energy for her work. And she was also beginning to suffer the stress of city life and the recurrence of an old shoulder injury sustained in a civil rights demonstration when she was a student in Greensboro, North Carolina.

"Something had to give," she recalls. "I need to live where it was warmer and less expensive. I got tired of having to compete for everything. I mean I don't mind competition, but having to compete for everything--a place on the subway, always waiting and standing...? Every nuance of life is competitive in that kind of urban place. I wanted to be able to go out and get my paper every morning and know it hadn't been stolen, and to feel safe. I knew I had to have those things. 

Thoughtfully, she adds: "And I needed to be able to devote all my time to the work. I thought I would be able to get by without having to take a job down here." That part has been hard, but except for short-term teaching now and then, Buchanan had managed to devote most of her time to "the work"--living off grants, the sale of her paintings, and sometimes help from people who just believe in her talent.

Nevertheless, she worries about the price she may have paid professionally for leaving the Northeast. She mises the cultural stimulation--the bookstores,the museums, the interaction with other artists. Sometimes she fears being out of the mainstream has hurt her career and wonders if she should have stayed. She thinks artists have to be visible in order to get the recognition and commissions they need in order to survive. She concludes: "Coming down herewas a good idea, but I worry that I've missed out on things. If you don't remain visible, people forget you."

But in another sense of the word, Beverly Buchanan will never be invisible. In 1980, she used a Guggenheim Fellowship to construct the monumental three piece "Marsh Ruins" in Overlook Park on the Georgia cost near Brunswick. The sculpture is starkly visible. Viewed from the air, the egg-like cluster looks like an offering made to some ancient God--or Goddess. The largest of the three pieces is almost as tall ad its five-foot creator. After carefully designing the piece and spending almost a year getting permission to place it in the part, Buchanan hired Brun [[strikethrough]] k [[/strikethrough]] swick contractor Max Emery to build the grouping, made of concrete and glazed with a native shell mixture called "tabby." 

Almost as dramatic, although somewhat less "visible," is Buchanan's "Ruins