I was doing my 5.4-kilometer creep (jogging is far too ambitious a word) around the running track at Victoria Park the other day, and on Lap 1 I noticed a woman painting.

The track is 600 meters around, so each time I went by I studied the woman and her work a bit more.

She was perhaps 65. Small. Sitting on a stool just to the side of the track with an easel before her and a bit of paper/canvas/cardboard about 15 inches wide and maybe 12 inches tall propped up on the easel.

She was painting a picture of the park. A watercolor. And what I found fascinating was what she left out.

She was well into her work when I started going around the track. She was close to finishing by the time I finished, about 40 minutes later.

Her work was quite detailed. She had picked a spot and angled herself so that she had the track in the foreground, with some shrubs and vines behind that, with trees interspersed among the lower foilage, and then a grassy gap … with more trees beyond that, standing taller. She would look up, brush poised in her right hand, then glance down at her easel and make a stroke or two. Then look up again.

I don’t know if she had five shades of green on her palette, but she was being very particular about that color. The light green of the sun-dappled plants. The slightly darker hues of the trees a bit farther from her. And the dark green of the bushes and shorter trees shaded by the larger trees.

Now, remember, I got only a few seconds to look at her work, each time I went past her. I didn’t feel it proper to just stop on the track and stare.

Anyway, my third or fourth trip around, I looked in the direction she was looking, and I saw what she saw …

And as I continued on that lap, it struck me:

“I don’t think she put any buildings in her painting!”

And the next time I passed her … and the time after that, to make sure I’d seen it correctly … I confirmed that observation.

No buildings in that painting. Nothing man-made.

Just nature.

She had oriented the image to limit the possibility of buildings being part of the scene. The tops of the distant trees reached nearly to the top of her painting.

But, even still, as I proved to myself on a subsequent lap, there were skyscrapers visible in her view. Soaring far above the trees, of course. But even between the trees. Actually, about one-third of her picture ought to have had high-rise buildings in them.

But she had chosen not to paint them. And I am sure I understand why.

As mentioned in previous posts here, Hong Kong Island, this part of it, where most people live, is starkly urban. You see buildings and streets and motor vehicles, and people and store fronts, and bright lights at night, and more people.

You do not see trees or bushes. And certainly not lawns.

She had chosen a spot where she could see all of that. The green. And she chose not to sully that image with something man-made and grimly functional and probably ugly.

She wanted her painting to be a Study in Greens.  That’s what she should have called her painting. A Study in Greens.

If I lived here, I would have art like that in my house. Something that reminded me of the nature that is nowhere to be seen — outside Victoria Park. I wonder if she will frame it and hang it in her little apartment. Or perhaps give it to someone.

It’s a wonderful vision, one to stare at late at night, maybe, when you’re feeling hemmed in, and to look out the window is to see another building. And another and another.

She can look at here work and see a world without buildings. A world that is all green. Maybe it’s a sort of Hong Kong fantasy, and I saw someone hard at work on creating a particularly elaborate and loving one.