COG6 Copy
City of Glass 6 - (Pages 106-112)    150x120cms

 

City of Glass 6 was shortlisted for the 2014 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and exhibited in the National Open Art national touring exhibition 2015/16.

 

SUN 10 JUNE 2012

This painting explores the first idea I had for the City of Glass series. Just as Quinn, the writer of detective-fiction who becomes a detective, transcribes the movements of his quarry Stillman onto a New York street map, I too have become a detective, extracting clues from the text and transcribing Quinn's walk from his home on W107th St to his clients apartment on E69th St, described on pages 106-112 in the novel* In turn the viewer becomes a detective, following my clues with their eyes.

Paradoxically, the facts and the truth of the detailed translation of the walk held back the painting: it was only when I allowed the line of the route to be brolken up and disguised that the painting came alive again. Like the letters the spell The Tower of Babel, invisibly written in the streets in the novel, my line is there but not there. 

 

COG6 2 Copy

 

Below is the painting at an earlier stage, where my gut feeling was that Manhattan was too 'cut-out' and the blue too cold and literal. In the finished piece, the yellow is 'something' and floods/flows through the island and the yellow splashes imply shipping and define scale. Within the order of the the grid-pattern, the painting now pulsates with the energy and chaos of the city. 

 

COG6 4 Copy

 

 

COG6 3 Copy

 

COG6 5 Copy
Faye and Ollie with City of Glass 6

 

* 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster