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- Ashley Hanson
COG 17 - (Adam & Eve) 200x60cms
Once the picture was up, I couldn't stop seeing the tower shape as a male figure and the Manhattan shape as female so I've changed the title, connecting of course to references to the Garden of Eden in the novel* I love the play between the object and image..the tower is both solid and transparent...it contains the image, it is behind the image, it looks down on the image, it is the image. The colours are luscious but the tower/figure adds a sinister oppressive note to the painting.
There is a kind of madness in doing these large scale pieces - it's impossible to work on the floor anymore and the studio is getting smaller and smaller with every piece I make. But the scale is necessary and right because the intention is for the viewer to be in the painting, looking down from an enormous tower on Manhattan below or to be on the street, becoming Quinn, following Stillman.
Love these words from Rothko, talking about scale: 'I paint very large pictures. I realise that histiorically the function of large pictures is painting something grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however - I think it applies to other painters I know - is precisely because I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command'
The soundtrack to this painting was all 1970's: Pink Floyd's 'Animals', (thank-you, Andy Garner), Tom Waits's 'The Heart of Saturday Night' and 'Hejira', my favorite Joni Mitchell album.
*'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster
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City of Glass 18 - Mystery 60x30cms
SAT 1 MARCH 2014
detail - Columbus Circle
beginnings..- Details
- Ashley Hanson
City of Glass 19 - (Park Ave) 210x60cms
City of Glass 19 - (Park Avenue) was 'Shortlisted not Hung' in the 2015 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Nearly!
FRI 21 MARCH
It's been a good week - I have a new painting and City of Glass 6 & 13 have been shortlisted for the Royal academy Summer Exhibition - fingers crossed.
The third tower-shaped painting in the City of glass series. The shift in this piece is that the verticals of the avenues extend beyond Manhattan to the edges of the canvas: the grid of the streets connecting to the grid of the building. I am enjoying the verticality and the subtle rhythms of angles and triangles around the painting but most of all I am enjoying the colour, the new blues and greys and reds. There are intriguing shifts in perception : what am I looking at? The view from the air, the view on the ground, an incredible giant tower, bigger than Manhattan. Is it one image or two? Is the tower transparent , made of glass? Is the image of the island-shape of Manhattan seen through the tower, or is it in front of the tower, or part of the tower, or outlandishly, painted on the tower like a giant mural? I think it is a new kind of space, slightly disorientating...
detail - East River bridges
In spite of the colour, the tower - the new Babel - is oppressive, which is what I want. It has the feel of the sinister tower of the Salvation Army training camp in Camberwell, maybe it is because there are no windows.
For a long while there was no title, which always worries me: it's an indication that I'm unsure what the painting is about. Because of the emphasis on the verticals, towards the end the favourite was 'The Vertical City'. This changed when I put in Washington Square with a fantastic pink made from Fanchon Red by Williamsburg Paint - at one point this small rectangle was the strongest thing in the painting, not just the colour but all the lines firing in. But even this couldn't compete with the long red stripe against the blue, a colour heaven that grips the eyes.
detail- Washington Square
My daughter Faye said it was her favorite painting in the series. She immediately zoomed in on the saturated colours flanking Park Avenue, re-affirming the choice of title. (Park Avenueis, of course, significant to the novel*). Denise was missing a particular blue that had been mainly painted out and wanted it back. I went back in the studio and added some more blues, especially to the bottom canvas, and it's made a big difference. Thank-you girls! Ollie likes the vertical lines carved into the paint.
The soundtrack to this painting was 'Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake. Beautiful.
*'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster
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City of Glass 20 - (Cage) 90x60cms
MON 14 APRIL
Stillman enters the cage formed by the grid of the streets where he walks - 'bounded. and on the on the north by 110th Street, on the south by 72nd Street, on the west by Riverside Park, and on the east by Amsterdam Avenue.'*
The cage also refers to Stillman's obsessions, the cage in his head. Perhaps my obsessions too, over two years of my life working on the series.
A couple more tweaks on Tuesday morning - a subtle vertical score down Stillman's back and a blob of blue paint on his left shoulder to lock him more into the painting, with the colour echoed, with a touch of green, in the small square touching Central Park in the top panel. The dot of the Hotel Harmony on Broadway provides a visual link between the two. Formal painting truth - what works in the painting - and context in harmony.
I am very aware of my photo-realist roots, especially when painting the figure - the fallacy of the frozen moment. The introduction of the figure of Stillman has shaken up the series and presented intriguing problems, not least how not to make him giant when placed alongside the street grid of Manhattan. To counter this, I've tried to place him in an ambiguous space, a 'painting space', one that doesn't exist out there, one that asks questions - where is he? He is standing on the tightrope of 72nd St. His 'illusionist' interpretation and position in the painting make you think you know what you are looking at but this is subverted, undermined, by the physicality of the paint and by the strong horizontal of the canvas divide and the subtle verticals that cut through his body. In this piece, the grid is also ambiguous - it's vertical, lifted from the background, an almost-delicate lattice you can put your hand through....the bars of Stillman's cave. At one point in the painting the grid covered him - he was in the cage - but the idea was rejected. It would only work if Stillman faced outwards, staring at the viewer.
in progress
*'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster
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Tower Triptych: City of Glass 16 -(Private Eye), City of Glass 17 - (Adam & Eve), City of Glass 19 - (Park Avenue)
This series started with a question: how do you paint New York? I found my way in through the written word* but with this piece, a triptych of three large scale 'architectural' paintings, I think I've found an answer. It's a skyline - the paintings/buildings lie flat against each other but there is also a receding space as the island-shape of Manhattan within them gets smaller from left to right.....
*'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster