Special Projects: The City Square Project

“In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, then they approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity. . . .

-Alberto Giacometti

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance – not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The Ballet Of The Good City never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

-Jane Jacobs

Introduction

The goal of the project is to produce a site specific unified series of two-dimensional works that recreate the experience of standing in a piazza or city square.

The artwork receives most of its inspiration from New York City, and the two Italian cities of Venice and Florence specifically their campos and piazzas. From the nature of their architecture and design to the organization of everyday life, both cities, have organized themselves with their piazzas as the center of activity and community. My first visit to these cities was a revelation and directly sympathetic with my experience in the streets of New York City in the 1970s and 80s.The project is also greatly influence and inspired by art and literature including Giacometti’s City Square and Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

While the project is derived from more than fifty years of visual note taking ,drawings, photography and the resulting paintings associated with the city square subject, it wasn’t until 2011 that I considered creating a large scale site specific work .

Piazza Santissima Annunciata 1995

Giacometti City Square

Bronze sculpture and drawing study

Florence and Venice with their urban design, architecture and structure of everyday life, have organized themselves with the piazza as the center of activity, commerce ,neighborhood and community. At the same time it is the space of coincidental encounters with anonymous strangers sometimes only for a moment. The experience of the city square is a complex contradictory combination of permanence and metamorphosis. The stage remains the same while the actors are transitory, always in motion and sometimes unpredictable. The experience is about movement in space.

While the theme/subject of the work is the city square, an additional subject of the project is the art-making process itself and the integration of new digital technology with traditional forms of art.

My background is in using the traditional mediums of oil paint, acrylic on paper and drawing with ink ,graphite, sepia and sanguine pencils. I learned analog photography and only turn to digital photography in the early 2000s.

As a consequence of being invited to work at Stony Brook Southampton’s digital printmaking studio in July of 2012 I began experimenting with combining large format digital photographs with drawing. While I have continued to make art with traditional mediums ,I have also continued to experiment with combining photography, digital printmaking, drawing ,painting .

Drawing on mixed medium composite at Stony Brook Southampton 2012

Bronze sculpture and drawing study

Work on the City Square project began in 2012. Preliminary efforts were exhibited in an unfinished state at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum in 2015 and a portion also exhibited as a virtual studio during my exhibition Florence Reconsidered at the temporary John Jermain Library on Bridge Street. Many of the challenges of integrating a variety of mediums into one piece remained unresolved. Since then I have continued to work on small scale studies for the project and through the experimentation with and development of smaller work my understanding of the possibilities and limitations of integrating the different mediums has evolved.

In January 2024 I received a residency at The Church, Sag Harbor and began working on large scale pieces each 5’x14’ for the project. They remain a work in progress.

Unfinished North panel at the Whaling Museum

Detail of North panel after work during the John Jermain Library exhibition (still unfinished )

Working on the same panel at the John Jermain Library

The Project -An Exploration of the Art Making Process

An Explanation

My drawings ,paintings and photographs are combined into composites digitally that are reworked with paint , graphite and collage elements, then resized ,printed and once again reworked. Disassembled and reassembled the goal is to transformed each piece them into a coherent artwork.A secondary goal is to ensure that the human touch is evident in the finished work and to celebrate it as a unique object. It also lays bare my method of making art and the centrality of drawing to the final product. Metaphorically the process used to create the art work mirrors both the metamorphosis of cities and the constant movement of people, the unscripted choreography within the measurable space of the city square itself . My painting process has always been about movement, the arrangement and rearrangement of shapes, lines, colors and values within the constraints of the canvas. It has also been about the illusion and manipulation of space.