Some phrases lodge themselves in your mind and quietly shape the way you see the world. “Endless skyway” is one of those for me—a line from Woody Guthrie’s iconic song This Land Is Your Land that I’ve carried around for years. When I encountered Iwan Llwyd’s poem Carreg Cennen, with its watchful Welsh castle and planes carving white trails over the Tywi valley, that phrase suddenly clicked into place.
My painting, “Endless Skyway” (30 x 30 cm), sits at the crossroads of those two worlds: the rugged, specific landscape of Carreg Cennen in Carmarthenshire, and the wide-open, roaming spirit of Guthrie’s song.

From “This Land Is Your Land” to Carreg CennenIn Guthrie’s song, the “endless skyway” is part of a sweeping vision of land and belonging--ribbons of highway, golden valleys, diamond deserts, and above it all, a boundless sky that seems to stretch forever. It’s a line about movement, distance, and the feeling that the world is both vast and somehow still yours to walk.
Llwyd’s Carreg Cennen, by contrast, is intimate and rooted. The poem takes you off the main road, along winding lanes that “hide in the hollows beyond Trap,” then on foot past ducks and horned sheep until you reach the castle “with fists full of wind.” There, standing in the bluster and quiet, you look up to see aeroplanes trailing white tails, stitching new routes into the sky.
When those two references met in my mind—Guthrie’s “endless skyway” and Llwyd’s watchful castle beneath modern flight—the painting began to form: a small square of canvas that holds both old stone and new journeys, grounded land and restless sky.

Building “Endless Skyway” on a Small CanvasAlthough 30 x 30 cm isn’t a large format, I wanted “Endless Skyway” to feel like a window onto something vast.
The composition grew from the idea of layers of travel:

• The hidden, winding roads of the poem: back lanes, tractors, the slow patience of rural life.
• The ancient watchpoint of Carreg Cennen: a high place of stone and wind, quietly observing centuries of change.
• The modern skyways of Guthrie and Llwyd: the empty blue distance above, streaked with the white lines of planes heading “to the new world.”

On the canvas, this turns into a kind of vertical journey. The lower area suggests the weight of the land—muted, earthy tones, gentle shifts in texture that hint at fields, slopes, and the valley floor. As your eye travels upward, the painting opens out into lighter, more spacious sky, where the marks become lean and directional, echoing those white contrails crossing above the Tywi.
I treated the sky not just as backdrop but as the main highway of the piece: a place of motion, routes, and possibility, in direct conversation with Guthrie’s “endless skyway.”

Old Stones, New Highways: What the Painting Means to MeAt its heart, “Endless Skyway” is about the tension and harmony between what stays and what moves on.
Llwyd reminds us that Carreg Cennen once guarded the main highway, part of a chain of castles along the Tywi. Today, the “real” traffic has moved elsewhere—you have to leave the obvious path, take minor lanes, and finally walk to reach it. Yet while the castle’s strategic importance has faded, above it there’s a new kind of highway: aeroplanes flying over the valley, leaving pale scars of vapor in the sky.
Guthrie’s lyric expands that image into something larger: the idea that above every landscape, from Welsh valleys to American plains, there’s an open, continuous skyway—a shared space of travel, migration, dream, and escape.
In the painting, I’m not trying to illustrate either text literally. Instead, I’m trying to hold that feeling of standing in a very specific place—a Welsh height of rock and wind—while being acutely aware of the larger world moving overhead. The castle becomes a symbol of history and endurance; the sky trails become symbols of ongoing journeys, new stories in motion.
“Endless Skyway” is where those two scales of experience meet.

A Window for Wanderers and RememberersEven though it’s compact at 30 x 30 cm, I imagine this piece as something that invites lingering more than passing glances.
I see it hanging in:

• A quiet reading corner, where the painting can spark thoughts of roads not taken and journeys still to come.
• A hallway or entrance, where it serves as a subtle reminder that every familiar place connects to an unseen wider world.
• A workspace, for someone who loves both history and travel—who feels the pull of old stories and new horizons at the same time.

The colors, textures, and upward movement are meant to echo that sensation of pausing on a height, listening to the lowing of cattle and the whistle of a lapwing, then looking up to see the faint streak of a plane and thinking: there are other lives, other lands, all connected by this same sky.

An Invitation to Bring Your Own JourneyWhen you look at “Endless Skyway,” I’d invite you to bring your own experiences into it:

• Maybe you hear Guthrie’s song and think of road trips, train rides, or times you’ve crossed big distances under a wide sky.
• Maybe you feel the tug of old places—ruins, castles, hills, ancestral landscapes—that whisper of lives lived long before yours.
• Maybe you simply recognize that strange harmony between feeling very small in the world and yet deeply connected to it.

For me, this painting is a conversation between a Welsh poem and an American song, between a stone fortress and an invisible air route, between rootedness and movement. For you, it might become something else entirely—and that’s the beauty of it.
If this piece resonates with you, or if you’d like to know more about how Guthrie’s lyric and Llwyd’s poem shaped specific aspects of the painting, I’d love to hear your thoughts. After all, every viewer who spends time with “Endless Skyway” adds another journey to the skyway it imagines.

​Ray Burnell is a landscape and seascape artist based in West Wales. His work primarily focuses on capturing the landscapes and seascapes of the region, showcasing the natural beauty from Aberystwyth to Port Talbot. Burnell's approach to his art includes painting en plein air, which means he spends time outdoors, setting up his easel in various locations to capture the immediate environment's essence directly onto canvas. His paintings are known for their vibrant colors and the atmospheric depth they convey, often featuring dramatic shifts in perspective between foreground elements and distant landscapes or skies filled with dynamic cloud formations.

​I am now a member of King Street Gallery cooperative in Carmarthen which includes artists from a wide range of disciplines, including contemporary fine art, ceramics, photography, stained glass, wood turning, textiles and sculpture. I will have work in their next exhibition opening in March. I'd better get painting !!!!
http://www.kingstreetgallery.co.uk/

Two of my Fishing Boat paintings are now in Pure Art, Milford Haven.

From 1st May until 30th September you will be able to see my paintings in The Courtyard Gallery at Picton Castle, Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire. There are around 40 original oil and mixed media paintings together with a number of framed prints. See the Picton Castle website for details. 
https://www.pictoncastle.co.uk/