City of Glass 15 - (Stillman walks...) 50x40cms
City of Glass 15 - (Stillman walks) was selected for the 2014 The Discerning Eye by colector Chris Ingram and the image was used for the advert for the exhibition in Galleries Magazine
The smallest painting yet in the City of Glass series. It's always a challenge going from big to small - there is no room, no space! - but I think that problem has been resolved.
In this painting I returned to the idea of how to place both the figure of Stillman and the map-shape of Manhattan in the same painting, without Stillman appearing giant. The painting started with Stillman in a gallery, walking past a painting containing the Manhattan shape (City of Glass 1) but the verticality, which has been a constant throughout the series, was missing. I think the solution is far more ambitious and intiguing. The vertical grid on the right is a specific section of the Upper west Side. As 'detective' Quinn discovers, Stillman's daily walks (where he invisibly writes the letters that spell THETOWEROF BABEL) are all within 'a narrowly circumscibed area, bounded on the north by 110thSt, on the south by 72ndSt, on the west by riverside Park, and on the east by Amsterdam Avenue. No matter how haphazard his journetys - and each day his itinerary was different - Stillman never crossed these borders.'
Next painting: 'City of Glass 16 - (1 block= 1 brick)', investigating again the enormous scale of the new Tower of Babel, which would be 'large enough to hold every inhabitant of the New World'
