Paintings from No Woman’s Land
I find my subjects in the places “in between”, where the remnants of Philadelphia’s industrial age, sometimes turned into housing, co-exist with new roads and dwellings. The colors of buildings can be worn and patchwork, or new and bright. Sometimes murals, or bright graffiti, decorate the walls. The hilly landscape space is defined by curving, sloping roadways that make their way down to and along the Schuylkill River. The skyline is punctuated with bright signs, and capped with magnificent clouds.
I walk most days on an old railway line, above the streets, where the wooden crossties have mostly sunk into the ground. There is a beaten path surrounded on both sides by wild vegetation. In spring, a stand of pale yellow mulleins is scattered across the land bordering the trail. This landscape is my home ground, a place between the crowded, residential city neighborhood where I live, and the dull set of shops and businesses around us.
To me, there is majesty in this landscape, with its acute angles and curving roads, its trees often growing on an angle, next to a concrete parking lot or driveway. The yellow-orange street lines and traffic light boxes become decorative, the light and shadows on the buildings take poetic forms, and the complex network of markers and differences in scale, help me to define the dynamic space which I have found, in my painting subject.
I call it “no woman’s land”. It belongs to no one, and when I enter it, to work on a painting or to search for a new one, I can feel my first breath there as one of freedom.
When the pandemic forced me to stay in, I found painting subjects out the window, looking down on the parking lot across the street. There is a wildness in the junky collection of cars, weeds, old buildings with sagging roofs, and factory buildings converted into housing, which drew me in, to start a painting. The weed trees punctuate the rows of conjoined houses on the hills. The colored windows and house fronts create a harmony with the changing colors of the foliage. The graphic shadows and curving chain-link fence lines define the structure of each painting.
It is a very difficult thing to keep looking at my subjects, over and over, through the slight changes of light as the season advances, and the quick changes as the day advances, knowing that my capture of this complex reality, will always be a partial one. I may go out over the time of several months, to record direct information about the subject, and to respond to the changing light and sky. I work in oil paint on canvas, directly from the subject. I measure and re-measure, because accurate details aid in the expression of the space as a whole. This is the way I have found to capture beauty.