red cross building, Broadway and 40th

Form (capital F) is as important to modern figurative painting as it is to sculpture and architecture. Naturally, I am focused on the form of my surroundings and my landscape. I address my life and express myself by painting not simply WHAT I see, but also that which captivates me and occupies my mind through living here. As painters living and working in an urban environment, we have to filter what's around us in order to gain more closeness to it, and in order to express that much more of the reality in which we live.

The Ashcan School (as mentioned earlier by Alika Cooper, thanks btw!) provided a foundation for all American painters with that sensibility. They painted their surroundings as they were, as industrialization had taken hold nearly all over the Western World - the natural landscape beginning to only be attained with an "exodus". Adopting and painting the cityscape along with all it's interesting industrial objects, thus rejecting the escapist and romantic notion that landscapes must be nature, is one of the very seminal foundations to our current approach to form and composition in modernist painting.

It is interesting to look back to the turn of the century photos that show more than ten times the amount of open space we have today, just one century later. Whoa!

Which brings me to my new series of works: The American Red Cross Building at 40th and Broadway. I have a view of the side and back of the building, lying just behind the abonimable 76 Car Wash. I'm taken in by it's magnitude, it's harsh shadows, high contrast and few windows. Here are some sketches and studies of it: