Form, Space, and Order Painting

Winter can be a nice time to head into the studio and work on some larger scale paintings. Plein-air painters have 'rainy-day' paintings and this is one of them, although this was more like a blizzard week painting. I've been meaning to paint this particular motif for a while now. If you've read my bio you'll notice I've always been into art, architecture, and construction. Well as I was starting to get serious about grad school I sought out a long-haired (fast) runner that I'd been friendly with who I'd heard was an architect. I contacted him over email and we met up multiple times to talk about school and the profession over coffee or beer. Actually, on one of these meetings, I got to go to his office in Cambridge and he showed me what he was working on...well, it so happens that at that time he was working on some of the early massing models for this building located on Bay State Road. I was naive about architectural design at the time and what he was telling me seems more clear to me now, but at the time I was so interested in how the form, space, and order of the building came together. Reflecting on it now as I sit in my art studio writing this, I suppose the reasons this building has always been interesting to me is the way I was initially introduced to it. ----- “Lighting effects impress us; more than any object represented as large we find to be beautiful. Masses impress us...the vast extent of the ocean; by the dark profundities of the forest...accompanying ideas of duration, grandeur, power, and solidity.” -Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1765 ----- My current body of work is born out of my enduring admiration for the tangible, three-dimensional reality of the built environment. Not only for the end result we see today, but the history behind the buildings too. If only the walls could talk... By day I’m a construction project manager and spend hours working on building projects in the Boston area. Through this process I get to know a building intimately working on it every day for months (or years) at a time. But even more influential is living and working in Boston which enables me to see the city over time, in all seasons, weather, and times of day. If a motif catches my eye I often go back to places numerous times to see various conditions that will allow me to capture the feeling that I would like to communicate. Art, architecture, and building have always been a part of who I am. Most recently, my paintings are studio works that came about after a period of time spent painting en plein air. I like to consider myself a direct observational painter (like my painting heroes George Nick and Christopher Chippendale), but in the winter of 2018 I fell and fractured my knee cap, limiting me to the studio rather than painting outdoors. I spent this time painting larger works over the course of days and weeks rather than a spurt of an hour or two en plein air. I was not happy about being stuck indoors at the time but the silver lining was that the work in the studio began to develop, the series grew and a body of work ready to show emerged. The intent of my work is to ask the viewer questions. Who inhabits these spaces? What was the city like when the building was constructed? It’s important to consider what we know about the modern world and then how these decades and centuries old buildings fit into our lives today, particularly if we want to make them last.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:48 W x 24 H x 1.3 D in

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