Sinking Cities
Oil on canvas, 5 x 12.8 feet (152cm x 390cm) 2009
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One work consisting of seven canvases. Individual canvases are inspired by stills and video frames taken in New York and Venice in the Summer of 2009. Each city has its own peculiar ‘flanneur formula.’ In Venice the buildings invite you to touch them as you walk the narrow streets. Casanova, Vivaldi, perhaps Visconti or Tarkovsky may have run their hands along the same wall. The rhythm of your walk is different in Venice than in Manhattan, and so is the nature of crowds. Walking thorough the city is a montage of fragmentary views– a façade, a skyline, a face, a square, a café, a monument. As we walk we pan, we tilt, we focus, we zoom in, we edit out. Dreams, films, and cities share many affinities, and I am particularly drawn to composing cinematic sequences of paintings that combine fragments of several cities just as in our dreams. Venice and Manhattan are both sinking cities, threatened by surrounding water, and it is almost impossible to buried in them. This is what links them in my imagination, and the order of fragments in this septatych is not rational, or conceptual, but rather personal, cinematic, and oneiric.
