Three weeks ago, I published the first in a series of daily website blog-posts, of writings and artworks that celebrate personal mobility, in pursuit of mindful engagements with history, nature and the environment.
In relation to a finished painting, or essay, this process is no less a work of art than is the tree to the fruit it bears.
Shared as messages of hope and solidarity, these posts will appear every day, until these dark days are behind us.

Exploring the banks of the Schuylkill River in 2018, between the mouth of Wissahickon Creek and Fairmount Water-Works I filled a sketchbook with paintings.
Later that year, a limited-edition suite of prints drawn from this journal would become the centerpiece of an installation at Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia.

Looking North toward Strawberry Mansion Bridge. June 12, 2018. O.T.W. (On the Water) Schuylkill River Sketchbook

Stretching southward along the west bank of the Schuylkill, between Saint Joseph’s University Gillin Boathouse and the grandstand beside Columbia Railroad Bridge is a broad, grassy embankment sloping gently down from Kelly Drive to a stone bulkhead on the riverbank. Traversed by pedestrian and bike trails, the strand is sheltered beneath a canopy of trees. At its northern extremity is Strawberry Mansion Bridge. Taking its name from an eighteenth-century estate originally known as Summerville, the span was hailed as a marvel of modern engineering. Privately funded, the entire structure was prefabricated twenty-five miles upstream by Phoenix Iron Company and assembled at its present location in 1897. Its filigree steel arches soared above the river, conveying trolley-cars, pedestrians, and vehicular traffic between the eastern and western sections of Fairmount Park. Trolleys stopped running in 1946. After decades of hard use and disrepair, the bridge underwent a major restoration. Work began in 1991 and was completed four years later, just two years shy of the bridge’s centennial.
Just behind my point of view is a parking-lot. Beyond that is the grandstand used for viewing rowing competitions organized by the Schuylkill Navy. Fishermen cast their lines in the river. Sunbathers and picnickers pick their spots along the esplanade. To the left, across the channel is Peters Island. By mid-twentieth century, the wooded sandbar had been married to the right bank of the river by silt, mixed with crushed coal. Before the right-bank channel was reopened in the nineteen-fifties, Peters Island was notorious for clandestine trysts. Stretched between the eastern shore of the island and the left bank of the river is a steel cable, from which are suspended numbered lane-markers to help rowing-crews maintain their positions.
Southeastern Pennsylvania had been deluged overnight by a series of massive thunderstorms. Whenever this happens, effluvia from sewage-treatment facilities upstream sometimes enters the river, tinting it a muddy orange. Under a clear blue sky, the effect has a certain visual appeal. For fishermen, it’s definitely a catch-and-release kind of day.

(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