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Swansea, South Carolina | Small-Town Stories & Saltwater Colors
Discover Swansea, South Carolina, through local stories and original Saltwater Color paintings celebrating the places and character of this small Palmetto State town. Story telling, Opa style!
PALMETTO STATE DAYTRIPPINGPALMETTO PLACES COLLECTION
Rom Webster & Opa
8/10/20264 min read
Palmetto Places: Swansea, South Carolina
Somewhere between the city of Columbia and the little town of Ulmer, Highway 321 passes through Swansea, South Carolina.
Swansea is the easternmost town in Lexington County, sitting not far from the place where Lexington, Orangeburg, and Calhoun counties come together. It is also near the headwaters of Bull Swamp, a broad network of creeks, wetlands, ponds, and sandy country that eventually sends its water toward the Edisto River.
And if you follow that water far enough, you begin to understand something about the name Palmetto Places—and about the paintings we're using to tell these stories.
The water that begins its journey among the swamps and ponds of the South Carolina Midlands eventually joins the blackwater country of the Edisto watershed and continues toward the coastal estuaries, tidal creeks, marshes, shrimp, crabs, and salt water of the Lowcountry.
Everything is connected.
And sometimes a good story begins by simply noticing where you are.
More Than a Place You Pass Through
Swansea is a quaint little town. Like so many of its sister towns scattered across the Palmetto State, there is considerably more here than meets the eye—especially if your only experience with Swansea has been passing through on Highway 321 on your way to somewhere else.
That's one of the reasons we're beginning this project.
Our hope with Palmetto Places is to tell some of the stories of South Carolina's small towns—not simply the famous ones or the places everybody already knows, but the communities we sometimes drive through without ever really seeing.
Every one of them has a story.
There are old churches and storefronts. Fire stations and town halls. Cafés and workshops. Houses that have watched generations come and go. Familiar signs, porches, crossroads, trees, railroad tracks, and buildings that may not make anybody's list of South Carolina tourist attractions but mean something to the people who live there.
And there are people.
That's usually where the best stories are hiding.
But we're going to tell these stories a little differently.
Painting Our Way Through South Carolina
Rather than simply identifying interesting places in each town and writing a short description of them, we're creating a collection of paintings.
We call them Saltwater Colors.
As far as we know, Opa invented the name. The paintings themselves are digital creations. They resemble traditional watercolor paintings, but there isn't a jar of water—or a wet paintbrush—anywhere in sight.
The basic tools are considerably more modern: an iPad, an Apple Pencil, and digital art applications such as Photoshop, Procreate, Fresco, and others.
But the technology isn't really the point.
The painting is.
What Is a Saltwater Color?
Opa has always had a particular fondness for impressionistic art, and that carries over into his Saltwater Colors.
His standard is fairly simple:
Someone who knows the place should recognize it.
Beyond that, we're not terribly worried about counting windows.
A Saltwater Color isn't intended to be an architectural rendering. Rooflines may wander a little. Trees may become a few loose washes of green. Shadows can be exaggerated. A doorway might be suggested with three or four brushstrokes. Details disappear when they don't contribute much to the story.
The goal isn't to document every brick.
It's to remember how the place felt.
That's especially appropriate for small-town South Carolina, because sometimes the things we remember most aren't particularly grand.
It's the old church sitting beneath the trees.
The faded storefront.
A fire station.
A café where everybody seems to know everybody.
An old house you've driven past a hundred times.
A building you never really noticed until one day you stopped and looked.
Those are the places we're looking for.
And Swansea is where we're beginning.
So we're going to slow down, get off the highway when necessary, look around, talk to a few people, learn a little history, and paint some of what we find.
This isn't intended to be the definitive story of Swansea.
It's our story of discovering Swansea.
And we'll tell most of it one Saltwater Color at a time.
Our Story
That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.
And more stories our coming!
Enjoy Our Swansea Saltwater Colors!
Click any image below to open the album and enjoy a closer look at our Swansea Saltwater Color paintings. Selected paintings may also be available in our store as postcards and greeting cards.
Business owners: If your business appears in this collection and you'd like reproduction rights to use the artwork, please contact us through the Contact Form on this website.
Most of all, enjoy your visit—and we hope these paintings help you see a little more of the charm and character of Swansea, South Carolina.
Form To Request Reproduction Rights
(Business Owners Only Please)
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Viewers may share links to the images in this gallery with family and friends. Please do not attempt to reproduce any these images in any print form without permission. All images are copyrighted material. Thank you for your consideration.
