Description

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Passengers and Pilgrims brings together landscape paintings from an El Camino pilgrimage in 2023, drawings I did on the Metro roughly from 2013 to 2018, recent paintings based on views from the Metro, and a couple of recent larger portraits. 

 

My recent journey started with paintings I did after an El Camino pilgrimage my wife Nancy and I took in Northern Spain, a trip that got me back to painting more seriously. The landscape there was full of light and natural beauty, and I felt a sense of mystery, maybe even grace about this. I wanted to recreate something of that in a group of landscape paintings, some of which include travelers walking through that world. I wanted these to be slower paintings that hopefully invite the viewer to also walk about in that world for a bit.

 

The set of Metro drawings emerged from my daily commutes into DC. After my mother and father died around 2013, these were a way for me to transform my passive commute into one in which I connected more with people, especially in this transitory, anonymous space. These were brief meditations out of which I felt I’d been given these visual poems, little gifts. 

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I was also taking photos from the train throughout this time from the elevation around Rhode Island Avenue station and the descent toward NoMa. These snapshots of this constantly changing part of the city, its expansiveness and color, and the way light fell over it presented themselves to me as paintings. So, I started doing these over the past few months. 

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We think of a pilgrim as someone who purposefully journeys to a sacred or holy place, with implied difficulty, and a passenger as someone passively transported, often in relative ease. Ideally, I’d love to be that third type of traveler, someone who sees the journey itself as destination, and awareness within any moment as arrival.​​

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