Language of Landscape just came down at Yonkers Arts after a month on the wall. Picking it up tomorrow.
The painting is of the Putnam Railway path in Van Cortlandt Park — a corridor I walk regularly as part of restoration work at the park. What I didn’t say enough when I submitted it: my grandfather and uncle both commuted this same path, decades before I started walking it as a painter and volunteer.
The WORDS show asked artists to interpret language in their own terms. My answer was that landscapes hold text we don’t always know how to read. The Putnam trail is a line — literally a rail line, now a walking path through the forest — but also a line of inscription. Generations move through a place and leave something in the ground. Restoration work trains you to look for those marks.
Are some of these trees witnesses to all three of us? I think they are.
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