Marking the land with our feet

Oct 23

Look closely and you’ll find footpaths carving through many of my paintings. The abstract landscapes I paint are largely imagined; but the remembered hikes and walks I’ve taken all over the planet are also present.

I’ve always loved following old trails, but it was a surprise how they started to seep out of my unconscious mind and into my paintings a few years ago. I’ve happily embraced them being there, but I’m only starting to understand, and to find some words to describe why this is.

One-person-at-a-time tracks

What I like is an old path, the older the better. Time-worn rural paths are better than urban. The best are narrow ones, tracing a river’s edge, cutting across a meadow, balancing atop the raised edges of rice paddy. One-person-at-a-time tracks.

I love finding the old paths wherever I am in the world. For example: in the Indian state of Sikkim, trails lace Himalayan communities together along deep valleys like necklace beads. Following the natural course of rivers and mountain contours they climb and turn, spooling out the striking landscape in a gorgeous slow-motion reveal.

How many feet on this narrow thread of earth?

In these “old” places, I wonder how ancient a path might be. Hundreds of years, a millennium or more? Imagine who’s walked this track, the children and adults and old people, in all the fifty or so generations of that millennium. How many feet pressing into this same narrow thread of earth?

Most of the time I’m exploring a place that’s unfamiliar; yet, by walking local paths and contemplating their providence, I find connection with these immensely old geographies. I also sense my relationship to the length and diversity of human history that’s moved along these trails before me. This makes me feel small, and reverent, like looking at the night sky.

Distilling connection, wonder and reverence into my work

It’s this feeling of reverence and wonder that I want to express in my artwork, though I haven’t a clear idea yet where this might lead. My attempts to capture them in my work feels clumsy and obvious sometimes. But the layers of paint I lay down, and the thin lines I draw across an expanse of canvas feel a little bit to me like the histories of people, walking their landscapes, leaving their mark.