cityscapes in contemporary art

[Stephen G. Pajewski]

All:
I am interested in contemporary artists' use of cityscapes in their work
(in any medium), with particular emphasis on the experiencing of the
physical environment, architecture, and mapping. The only artist that
comes to mind for me is the work of Yvonne Jacquette, with her aerial
views of cities. Anyone know of others to check out?

Thanks,
Steve Pajewski
Pittsburgh, PA
sp...@andrew.cmu.edu

[WYNNK]

In article <khy8eO600...@andrew.cmu.edu>, "Stephen G. Pajewski"
<sp...@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:

Randal D udley who shows with OK Harris in New York City does
marvelous views of the
Gowanus canal and other Brooklyn sites.

[ChasE9]

you might check into the photography of Kenneth Snelson.. He's mostly
known for his tensegrity sculptures, but he's quite a photographer as
well.. I saw a really excellent book of his panoramic photos of
cityscapes, executed with an antique large format pano camera.
They're astonishing, even from a technical point of view.

[John Clemens]

Jeff Tabor, a Massachusetts artist, has been doing a series of cityscapes
of Boston. They are fascinating and beautiful pieces, sort of abstract,
very colorful. He's at the Art Exchange Gallery in Acton, Mass.

[Ron Rizzo]

Steve,

Look at Richard Estes' paintings. He's a "photorealist" who concentrates
on intricate, yet largescale and lifelike views of big city scenes. In
particular find a book about him that shows the various stages from sketch
to finished work he passes through: how he works is surprising. In particular
try to find reproductions of his underpaintings.

Despite the final "photographic" appearance of his pictures, Estes works in
a very painterly fashion. He makes an elaborate underpainting that looks
like other people's finished work. He then gradually builds up the modelling,
tone and color intensity, taking the painting through many stages, revising
a great deal, sometimes rearranging buildings or including things not in
the actual scene.

His easels are "drafting tables" he's built with huge multiple mobile T-squares
that he's mounted vertically.

Another NYC photorealist, Richard Coddrington, focusses on neon and other
signs and the surrounding building frames or cornices, so that his meticulous
depictions become abstract compositions.

Also check out the city paintings of the Ashcan School, especially John Sloan
and George Bellows, who did many paintings, prints and drawings of NY city
life early in the century. For that matter, Edward Hopper's paintings are
often set in cities.

For a machine age aesthetic, see Charles Scheeler's "double exposure"
paintings and prints of skyscrapers and industrial installations.

Before she moved to New Mexico, Georgia O'Keefe painted the big city often
in large, boldly simplified compositions.

For the use of unusual or multiple systems of perspective the paintings of
Rackstraw Downes have been recommended to me (I haven't seen any yet; I
assume some are of cities).

For a looser, more interpretive, less "architectural rendering" approach,
see Oscar Kokoschka's colorful panoramas of European capitals. Both
the Impressionists (Monet, Pissarro, etc.) and Fauves (Dufy, Derain,
Matisse, Marquet, etc.) painted city views of London, Paris or smaller
French cities. Also see Whistler's paintings and prints.

Here are some tips on painting cityscapes from my instructor, Joel Babb, who
teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston:

1) make or buy a mahl stick---it's basically a 1/4" or 1/2" wooden
dowel ending in a ball covered in felt or other soft cloth on
which you reast your hand or wrist to steady your head as you
draw straight lines. Art stores sell collapsible aluminum mahls.
2) Buy or make a T-square, perhaps designed to the particular
dimensions of the painting you're working on (the wood in the
T-square and the frame it rests on can always be disassembled
and used in pictures with other dimensions). You can even
nail a pivoting screw into the frame and attach the mahl-stick
stick to it, using it to draw the many diagonals required by
a system of perspective.
3) A city scape includes many instances of architectural elements
such as windows, doors, cornices & lintels, sides of buildings
and even buildings themselves, sidewalks, vehicles, particularly
in aerial views. You want to adopt a systematic yet painterly
approach to rendering all of this, else it will take you forever
to complete a painting. Here's what my instructor advised for
oil painting (but it works for other media):

a) take for example a building facade. To quickly and
accurately paint the windows, doors, ledges & bays,
decompose the facade in your mind into a kind of PLAID
of horizontal and vertical tones and colors.

b) using a ruler or mahl stick, and proceeding in an order
that makes sense, paint unbroken lines of color and tone
in one orientation (eg, vertical) that indicate entire
rows or columns of windows & doors, or entire ledges
or cornices, using different colors or tones to distinguish
light and shade or materials (brick vs. glass vs. wood).

c) Then immediately continue and paint similar unbroken
lines in the other orientation (eg, horizontal), wet-in-
wet.

d) Continue adding to the "plaid" in this fashion until you
have reached the desired degree of detail (or sharpness,
tonal contrast, color intensity). When colors become
muddy where lines cross, simply add more pigment of
greater color intensity. It's done entirely wet-in-wet
and is surprisingly effective. After some practice you
will abe able to quickly render entire buildings crisply
and with distinct detail.

e) You really DON'T want to do this entirely "freehand":
you need a T or mahl-stick to get lines and edges that
are clean and distinct. You're using a well-tipped
soft round brush (sables are good) with paint that has
a lot of medium mixed in it (needed to make the paint
"flow" easily for fast efficient painting) so you need
a "mechanical" aid. But this approach allows you the
kind of freedom with color, tone and accent that looser
kinds of painting do.

f) For example, to paint a row of wood-frame windows in a
brick facade:

use a sable round brush with a decent tip
mix up a good amount of medium to have at hand
(eg, linseed oil, turpentine, cobalt drier if
you want fast drying)

for brick use alizarin crimson, naphthol red, cadmium
orange to lighten and a blue (ultramarine) and
green (viridian) to darken

for wood window frames use white & raw sienna for the
sunlit parts and burnt umber for shaded parts
for glass panes & reflections, use white with ultra-
marine, with raw sienna, and maybe viridian/ultra-
marine mixed with their complements for "dark"
reflections

Brush a lot of medium over the area of the canvas to be
painted.
Make quick sketch in burnt umber of the main verticals,
then the horizontals.
Paint the areas of bick around/between the windows syste-
matically, perhaps vertical "columns" of brick first,
and mix the color ON THE CANVAS rather than on your
PALETTE: eg, brush a stroke of alizarin, then over it
naphthol red, then green to dull it to look more like
brick, then orange using a lot if it's a sunlit area,
then the complements (blue, green) for the part of
the brick in shadow, etc.

Add color, tone or medium as you need them keep the
drawing firm and the tones & color accurate yet
effective.

Joel Babb himself has done large aerial and street level compositions of Boston
and other cities in oils and watercolor but the ones I know of are all in
the northeast.

[Timothy Collins]

Diebenkorn is it, I think so.....heavy thick paint, some wonderfully
vertigo producing images of San Francisco city streets....

Letsee, Morgan Ohara....maps personal travel of individual over their
lives at that point....overlays a series of lines on a map then removes
the map.....fascinating process.

A recent lecture by "urban geographer" Bonnie Loyd of SF tells, stories
of geographers mapping everything from the evolution of the womens role
in the kitchen to..........the way people percieve a place, and
resultantly move through the place (Books Kevin Lynch of MIT I think)

I once walked the old SF shoreline in a white tuxedo with a lantern at
midnight.....dousing the "Audience" hand in bay water at the beginning
then disapearing into a cave on the shoreline a couple of blocks away to
douse the light. (The old shoreline is shockingly obvious as you walk the
terrain......six to eight blocks inland)

The City of Seattle has developed an interactive "Public Art" kiosk which
alllows people to preview, locate and read about stuff before they see it.
........I think theres lotsa stuff out there.