Waiting for the crisis to pass, our thoughts go out to friends and loved-ones, who also shelter in place. News arrives of old friends passing away, people we knew and admired. Despite our temporary confinement, we can still celebrate travel. Sharing these pictures and memories also send messages of hope, not just for our own survival, but that when the crisis passes, we might discover thing we might have taken for granted, to draw strength, wisdom and compassion from deeper engagements with nature.
Exploring the banks of the Schuylkill River in 2018, between the mouth of Wissahickon Creek and Fairmount Water-Works, I filled a sketchbook with journal-paintings. Later that year these would become a limited-edition suite of prints, and the centerpiece of the installation O.T.W. On the River, at Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia.
LOOKING SOUTH FROM THREE ANGELS April 22, 2018. Schuylkill River Sketchbook.
Widening into a bay North of Girard Avenue Bridge, below a point where the river turns left downstream of Columbia Bridge, broad grassy esplanade flanks the river’s banks. Created when landfill replaced pestilential wetlands, that once teemed with disease and mosquitoes. Along the left bank is a grove of Japanese cherry trees. Across Kelly Drive is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s equestrian portrait of General Grant, at the foot of Fountain Green Drive.
Near the water, an angelic trio dances on narrow, twenty-foot concrete columns. Playing Angels is a work produced in 1950 by Swedish sculptor Carl Milles a former student of Auguste Rodin. From 1931, Milles lived for in the United States for twenty years, designing fountains and other public art for other cities like Detroit, Saint Louis, and Wilmington. Philadelphia owns the distinction of having one of the largest collections of public art in the world.
Flowering every spring, the nearby cherry-grove was established in 1926, when the government of Japan sent sixteen-hundred botanicals to Philadelphia, in honor of the sesquicentennial of American independence. Cherry trees were planted in various locations along the river and within Fairmount Park. Crossing the river downstream is the aforementioned Pennsylvania Railroad Connecting Railway Bridge. In 1873, its adjoining arches were enlarged. Further work was competed on widening the bridge in 1915, from two tracks to five. A statue of Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt that stood in the path of these improvement was moved across the river, near the present-day site of the Dragon-Boat dock.
The original iron truss-span that appears in Thomas Eakins’s 1871 painting Max Schmidt in a Single Scull was removed, and replaced with the great masonry arches we see today. Rising behind the viaduct is the distinctive form of the new Comcast Technology Center, art of Philadelphia’s ever-evolving skyline.Known to the rowing community as Three Angels, oarsmen and women pass it on the water.
Dancing to silent flutes, above flowering cherry-trees, the angels cheer them on.
Oarsman passing Three Angels. 3.5 x 10.5 inches. Schuylkill River Sketchbook. 2018
(A preview of SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER by James L. McElhinney (c) 2020. Schiffer Publishing).
Copyright James Lancel McElhinney (c) 2020 Texts and images may be reproduced (with proper citation) by permission of the author. To enquire, send a request to editions@needlewatcher.com