I was lucky enough, some years ago, to do a big exhibit called "Painting the Town: Richmond Neighborhoods Past and Present." It ran for a full year at a public institution that is now called The Richmond History Center and was a monument to both curatorial zeal (theirs) and ass-backward productivity (mine entirely.) Artifacts were dredged up, intriguing sorts of detritus put under glass, photographs enlarged and captioned, and my paintings were interspersed among these things.

The most intriguing photographs came from the Edith Shelton Collection, a scarcely-documented treasure donated by its creator to what was then The Valentine Museum. These photos were in decent condition, but nobody had bothered to put them in any order, or even label some of them. Yet they were a magnificent labor of love bequeathed by a woman who had given her heart to a place that rewarded her somewhat, during the day, as a newspaper photographer - a hard gig for a Richmond lady.

She took mostly color slides, which offer a heartbreakingly candid view of a city that was divided – as most cities still are – by race and class. She loved its brawling corners, well-kept lawns, and uneasy history in equal measure. By almost any reasonable yardstick, she was an artist – a distinction I would deny most photographers.

Ms. Shelton's steps were grooved on Jackson Street long before mine. She took a photo of these very houses when Jackson was one among hundreds of streets that made the neighborhood that bears its name a viable place to live and do business. (In just a few years, 1-64 was widened, nearly stopping the heartbeat of a community whose roots stretched back to the late Eighteenth-century; it has not recovered since.) In Ms. Shelton's view, there is a shocking tidiness. These houses clearly meant something to the people who owned them. There is also that hauntingly evanescent quality of a moment seized and still living. Both color and clarity are good enough for one to appreciate the new paint, the well-trimmed bushes, the tub-shaped automobile that seems half as big as a house.

I did not remember the photo as I painted the picture, but ran across it one day as I was looking for something else. (The museum had given me a "rejected" copy.) There, in a shallow drawer, was West Jackson stranded in the 1940's and here I was sixty-odd years later, sternly appreciating time's passage - as intriguing a phenomenon now as it was to me as a child, when, for the first time, I felt swept up in a kind of invisible torrent that could carry me along for a certain time, then drop me. (As it did to all these houses. Not a single one of them is left today.) We have Mrs. Shelton's golden image to celebrate their perseverance, and my newer one to show them as that invisible current was slowing down.