Various Midtown Buildings I Have Never Visited Print

I collect photographs, snapshots especially, which I draw. I also collect picture postcards, particularly aerial views. This is a view of midtown Manhattan, possibly from the Empire State Building. Instead of drawing a complete picture I drew my way from building to building as they touched each other in the photo, right, then up, then left, a little more here, more there, but incomplete. The result is a kind of jigsaw. I've been doing this more lately, with people, with landscapes, interiors, botanical arrangements, leaving things out. The eye tends to complete the picture anyway, and this incompleteness reveals other things we tend to miss, simple shapeliness, the gestures, the hieroglyphics of a familiar pattern.This drawing was made from an old photograph, so much of it is gone now anyway. Take away the new towers and the old city would look gap toothed. Maybe there is a fog drifting over it. Observers of cities develop a kind of aphasia, seeing what they like, reinserting what they remember.