After a heavy snow I noticed more than a few people trying to walk on the un-scooped side walks. They weren't on a leisurely stroll,
they were trying to get somewhere, probably a bus stop. In many cases the sidewalk had been piled up with snow from a parking lot or a road, and the only way through was to walk on a busy snow packed thoroughfare. Where I live, property owners are supposed to clear the side walks, almost none do in a timely fashion, and the local government clears the road way. This is discriminatory, it's the only way it can be describe. Many of the people walking are poor, many are old and many are young. Not scooping the sidewalk is socialopathic symptom that will only hasten our use of a car when we need not.
In the rural areas there is a deficit of reserved walkable pathways. In Britain there is a right to trespass, that is there are trails that lead often from town to town, that have been used for a very long time. People have asserted their right to walk these trails over and over again, and have gone to court to keep their right to trespass open, the enclosure acts is what you will have to read about if you what to learn more. In this country it was and is a religious orthodoxy of property rights that have shape our land. (Set aside the issue of a slave as property, even though that is gigantic in historically figuring our property rules) Now this is speculation but I would say that this idea of property developed as a reaction to the Native American assertion of their rights to pass freely on the land. You see the land scape wasn't just as free and untrammeled as we have always been led to believe. There were native pathways all over the place. In fact: (not speculation) - if you pay close attention there are pathways in the Rockies that have been converted to hiking paths, and are named accordingly. Where there was no land set aside, the trails were blocked with fencing or made into road ways. One of the ways to keep the native from migrating back in to your land was to make trespassing illegal. That would effectively put who ever wanted to travel, on a government controlled highway system. So the process of segregating the Native Americans led to a extreme shortage of public pathways, and as our cities became more Sub-urban they adopted this sort of transportation frame work.
again all speculation.
I went to south Florida once, and you can inversely read the age of the development by how many lanes the main road has. That could be to simplistic, but in and around the newer gated communities there are roads that are 10 lanes across. Being from a small Midwestern town, this blew my mind. I kept repeating, “look at that! Eight lanes. Oh my gosh 12 lanes. Oh no, just 11, or wait - I can't figure out.” They need all these lanes because there is only one way in and one way out of a gated community, (there could be more I only saw one) traffic doesn't have many ways to flow but one. Also I will wager that in a few years or months, maybe two or more of these gated communities will get in a war and mount cannons on their walls and put bunkers in key positions. That would lead to even more snarled traffic and eventually somebody would come up with the idea that maybe they could build a office or a shop close to there house, so that somebody would never have to leave the gated community and the ten lane roads could be used for landing strips for a local air force. But seriously, everything is so spread out, and dependent on a large infrastructure to support driving like a maniac from your gated community to the restaurant to gas station to work to the restaurant to the school to the gas station to the enemy gated community to the gas station, that eventually the tax burden will become so heavy that the local economy won't be able to support it. It seems they are all incredibly wealthy down there so maybe they could. In most environs that will not be the case, and if development like that is continued, there will be a point of no return and an unsustainable debt load will keep economic activity suppressed. We could be in that situation now, I don't know
So scoop your side walk for the survival of humanity.
...To compete with that electric glow of the television I give in to the saturated color scheme and give the luminosity a boost. I do this - as best I can by first laying down a opaque coat of pearlescent paint on the white gesso surface ( pearlescent gives off a glow when light hits its, like a car license plate. ) then build it up with Three or four layers of increasingly transparent pearlescent paint until I end up with a thick layer of clear medium. Over that I lay down the first, transparent set of colors; usually laying down the opaque colors as I finish. Of course I don't adhere to this method religiously, Of late I have been drawing a good portion of the image in pastel chalks then painting a clear coat over that; then I finish it off, using that method of clear to opaque. This process can also be referred to as thick to thin when using oil paint, I use acrylic medium...
...Content, for me, is usually taken from my surroundings. I sketch something either on a surface or commit it to memory. Then take this preliminary image and simplify it, edit it, tune it, and usually end up with my completed image. Sometimes the - "simplify it, edit it, tune it"- is done before I lay down the first bit of paint; Other times I make It up as I go along. Usually the preplanned image turns out representational and the stream of consciousness image is abstract. There are times where the two processes synergize; which is I look for representation in the abstractions and simplify the representational, that's usually the fun part. Tedious parts of my process are always at he end and most always involve putting in detail that I feel I must put in.
Ian Mitchell