Spend enough time on the trails of the park and you’ll probably run into him. He bikes Forbidden Drive with a stack of panels, stopping whenever something catches his eye.

In winter, when the temperature drops and the light goes flat, he wears the battery-powered heated coat he bought for the purpose. It gives him about three hours. “When that battery dies,” he says, “you’re racing for the house.”

His name is Nicholas James Harris. He’s a realist painter, meticulous by nature, who might spend months, even years, on a single studio painting. He photographs his work at the start and end of every session, and tracks his hours at the easel in a spreadsheet.

He’s also a plein air painter — out in the landscape, responding to the light and weather as they shift with each moment. The studio work is controlled, deliberate, and indoors. The Wissahickon is where he goes to be surprised.

“For something like that to exist in one of the largest cities in North America,” he says. “You can be lost in it.”

Drawn to nature

Now 70, Harris grew up in Willow Grove, in a neighborhood that backed up to the woods. Walking in the forest always felt natural to him. When he talks about going down into the Wissahickon and getting lost in it, he sounds like he’s both discovering something new and also returning to something familiar.

In one of his earliest memories of painting there, he was still living outside Washington, D.C. He drove up, found a spot near the Henry Avenue Bridge, sat down practically in the water, and sketched the schist. “I’m terrified of snakes,” he says. “And I’m sure they were there.”

That was decades ago. Harris has been making paintings of the Wissahickon ever since — its bridges, its stonework, its geology, its light in winter. In a quiet way, that makes him one of the valley’s chroniclers. And he takes that responsibility seriously.

Harris has a name for what he makes: OTOTEs. Objects That Ought To Exist. When he finishes a painting, he steps back and thinks, “This seems like it’s supposed to be here.” The painting then has to find its own life and its own audience.

“Once I’m gone,” he says, “my job is done. But the paintings have to survive.”

It’s not just the forest that keeps Harris coming back, he says. It’s also all the structures, and the way they seem built out of the landscape.

The Walnut Lane Bridge, he says, is a painter’s “gold mine.” So are the monastery’s house and stables, with the trees stripped back. The stone walls that hold the hillside in place, and the WPA-era stone shacks that tuck along the trails. To him, it feels accidental, and marvelous. Recently, he’s been focused on the transmission tower between the two modern bridges at Twin Stones.

“At night, that tower is really pretty mystical,” he says. “The world is different then. It’s as if it’s not aware that you’re there, and it’s trying to guard its secrets, but they’re seeping out at the edges.”

He already has a drawing of it. This summer, he plans a nocturne.

The Valley's Long Memory

The Wissahickon didn’t always look the way it does today. There’s history underneath what Harris paints.

The valley was once the center of water-powered industrial activity in British North America. Then, when steam arrived, the mills no longer needed to sit on a stream, so the city bought up the land to protect the watershed and demolished what was there.

Harris thinks that was a loss. “It just would have been nice,” he says, “if some of those structures had survived.”

The geology, too, has power. The mass of the larger boulders, the glint of the schist, and the way rocks are carved by water to create a record of what time does to stone.

“There’s something really essential about life, and the processes of the natural world, in that,” he says. The schist is brittle, fracturing into the angular slabs and flat-faced boulders that give the valley its particular look — rock that has outlasted everything built above it, but breaks clean when it goes.

Manipulating the page

He used to go out with a stack of random panels, stop wherever something caught his eye, and try to paint it. Some worked, some didn’t. Now he first takes paper and black and white chalk to make composition drawings, then scans them, drops them into PowerPoint, and lays diagonal and orthogonal lines across the image. He crops it different ways, printing as many as 20 versions of a single drawing.

“You can look at them all simultaneously,” he says, “and you realize — that works on that corner, but now you’ve lost something over here.”

Winter is its own subject. When the leaves are gone, you can see the structure of the landscape. The light is completely different. He considers his cold-weather paintings possibly the most interesting work he does in the valley.

He’s learned some things the hard way.  Near Kitchens Lane Bridge, he was five hours into a session when the clouds came in and took away the shadow he’d been working with all morning. It was gone.

“Sometimes you have to deal with what you’ve got,” he says. “Not what you wanted.”

But sometimes what you’ve got is this: one afternoon, riding back along Forbidden Drive after a painting session, he looked down and saw a bald eagle coming in low over the water, just below him on the trail.

“Those are just nice experiences,” he says.

Still evolving

These days, Harris thinks about what will happen to his paintings after he’s gone. He’s got a five-part plan: distribute the work widely, place it with collectors who have the means to maintain it, make sure those collectors pass that responsibility on in their wills, and eventually get the work into a public collection, where it can be shared.

He cares about it so much that his will includes a fund to provide grants for realist painters after he’s gone. He wants the paintings and the practice that made them to survive. The rest, he says, he doesn’t think about much.

When asked one day, “What do you want to be remembered for?” Harris replied,

“I’m less concerned about that than whether the paintings survive. Once I’m gone, my job is done.”

Harris is building a website he plans to use as a diary, a place to gather his images and see what’s there. He’s got a whole section just for the Wissahickon. That section, he says, is still evolving.

Find the artist at nicholasjamesharris.art.