Language of Landscape

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. My grandfather and my uncle both commuted this same line, decades before I started walking it as a painter and volunteer. The WORDS show asked artists to interpret language; my answer was that landscapes hold text we don’t always know how to read. Generations move through a place and leave something in the ground. Are some of these trees witnesses to all three of us? I think they are.