This painting combines the busy 6 train platform on 14th street in Manhattan with one of the hillside streams that runs in the wooded canyons surrounding my homestead only a few miles from downtown Portland. It's a reminder that many of our modern transportation corridors and buildings followed former watercourses and other natural creases in the topography. In fact, Miller Creek is still shown on many surveys, platt maps and records as "Water Road" leading to planned subdivisions that fortunately never came to be, at least here...instead, it remained a rarely seen stream in an undeveloped part of Forest Park where native fish have now returned.
The former massive fill and small culvert under the highway where this stretch is located was replaced with a high bridge a few years ago, daylightling the fish run for the first time in many decades. The electric inter-urban railroad that spanned the creek about a hundred feet upstream of this spot in the early 1900's is now long gone, but the even older freight (and former passenger) spur line crosses it on a low trestle just downstream of the road bridge and still carries trains loaded with oil, logs and wood products daily.
Rising sea levels, record setting extreme weather, a global shifting of habitats and water resources...we are forced to acknowledge and adjust. The dramatic images are everywhere. Flooded subways and neighborhoods after "superstorm" Sandy, the last few winters' mountains of snow and frigid temperatures in the northeast US, and the searing droughts and wildfires elsewhere while the polar ice caps calve sub-continent sized chunks. These are unsettling and disruptive indicators of the consequences of our ant-hill of activities and the unrelenting march of geophysical time. Few of us are willing to pay the price now of making major changes to our lifestyles and routines that might slow or delay catastrophe, but we or our descendants will almost certainly pay later.
If you're in the Portland area, I've recently hung over 25 paintings in a great new shared workspace facility in the Pearl District located in a large historic building. Please contact me directly for location and access information or stay tuned for an opening annoucement in April.
My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram