All of the above: Ways Road, Ways Lane, & Eastern Railways Tracks

Dear friend,

It stopped raining the previous day. The grounds are still saturated from the previous years’ rains, but one could be excused for not noticing because it is clear skies and dry today. Even the soil of my potted flowering plants have dried out. But it rained the previous days. The flowers must have been terribly thirsty.

Anyway, here is another spot that challenges me. I have been asking myself, should I paint what I see, or what I want to see. I prefer the latter. It is more fun and interesting.

This road along East Penn Railways’ tracks has two names: It starts off as Ways Road, and then it becomes Ways Lane. According to the map, there is no intersection marking when one begins and when the other ends. One thing for sure is that this corridor is slated for development — retail, rentals, townhomes, pedestrian paths and bikeways, and parks. It is all talks for now, but whatever the developers do, I hope they will do it right; that is, to build for people and not for cars. There should be millions of miles of pedestrian pathways and bikeways as there are millions of miles of roads and highways.

Ways Road and Eastern Railways Tracks

Oil on panel, 8 by 10 inches.

The things we see when we slow down

The weather was nice, so I decided to take a slow walk along Red Clay Creek to paint something before the rainy days return, and we have been having plenty.

While at the creek, I spotted a snake. I think it is a common garter snake. The things we see when we slow down.

I picked this spot because it felt nice — the light draped and caressed, the birds were soothingly singing, and there were lots of typical forest busyness; twigs, branches, trunks, vines, leaves randomly going this way and that way. I had to mentally sort out and edit the elements. Do I paint everything I see, or do I paint what I want to see?

While I was painting, I spotted a red-bellied woodpecker announcing its presence on a tree above me. I think it was feeding its family nesting in the hollow of the tree. Funny that they are called red-bellied when their bellies are hardly red.

Male Red-Bellied Woodpecker

Screencapture from Merlin Bird ID app

If you could imagine it, it could exist

Dear Friend

To save a failed 2011 painting from Coriano Italy.

I did this painting with a clear blue sky from the balcony of my brother and his wife’s home in Coriano. If you look long and hard you might see Rimini, and if you look harder, you might see Ukraine.

A clear blue sky is beautiful but it can be so uninteresting when it takes up most of the design, so I added clouds.

Coriano Hills

Oil on panel, 10 by 12 inches

Has anyone (or even yourself) ever said to you that the clouds you have imagined could not exist, and then one day you see the clouds that were not supposed to exist!

Or how about the colors of the sky and clouds? A landscape artist once said in a workshop that such colors (I forget which colors he was referring to) in the sky are impossible, and then some years later, I saw the colors that he said were not possible. If you could imagine it, it could exist! Now let us imagine peace.

“Fiction is eternal; reality perishes. Invented forms live; real ones vanish. Truth is ephemeral; illusion, everlasting.” — Jiri Krasek Ze Lvovic