Myrtle and Dekalb - framed

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Myrtle and Dekalb, 2017, oil on card, 16 x 17 cm  AVAILABLE 

This picture was framed for the Society of Scottish Artist`s Annual show.

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Bushwick Park, Brooklyn, New York

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 Near Cooper Street, Brooklyn, oil on card, 17.5 x 15.2 cm  available

This, above, is  one of the best of the bunch.  The colours are fresh, harmonious and original. The picture was painted fast but isn't slapdash. 

It's pretty much what I worked to make: I recall that when I arrived I had this sense of irritation about how fussy my work had become and how I wanted to remove all its fiddly details and make something assured, elegant and fresh- on the  back of New York's architectural boldness.

I harboured the desire to create pictures with a similar confidence, giving the same satisfactions as such typography as this:

 Rockaway Avenue, Brooklyn, oil on card, 12 x 14 cm  - available

The grand terraces remind me of Glasgow.

 A view from Jefferson Avenue, Brooklyn, oil on card, 16.5 x 18 cm  SOLD

Looking down from the roof,  Jefferson Avenue, Brooklyn
 oil on card, 17.5 x 15.5 cm - unavailable

Painted from the rooftop (above), this is almost a remaking of a painting from Queens five years ago: this one large and more unruly. I think this sort of pictures chimes a lot stylisically and thematically with Joan Eardley.

A view from Jefferson Avenue, Brooklyn

oil on card, 16.5 x 18 cm  AVAILABLE

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Williamsburg, New York City

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Buildings near Marcy Avenue, Williamsburg, oil on card, 17.5 x 17 cm - available

 Myrtle and Dekalb, oil on card, 16 x 17 cm  AVAILABLE 




I find this painting effective and even beautiful.

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Three weeks in New York: 1. Bedford-Stuveysant from above

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View from my room in Bedford-Stuyvesant (detail)

The following six posts concern my recent, three-week trip to New York and what I found there.

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I'd worried before leaving that I was about to be trapped in a Disneyfied simulacrum of New York, the city perhaps having been cleaned to sterile excess by over-zealous mayors and their planning officers. I was happy disembarassed of this delusion: Bedford-Stuyvesant at south-east Williamsburg borders, where I first stayed, is every bit as sketchy as I could have hoped- while remaining safe.

 Yes! There are abandoned cars, empty lots, graffiti, giant signs offering bridging loans, miserable diners and broken railings and so forth. Reassured, I launched into work, dragging my easel here and there.

This first set of pictures depicts the area of Bedford-Stuyvesant from the roof of my pad in Ellery Street. These are the only views I managed from above. There is something about the claustrophobia of New York that invites, perhaps necessitates, that the visitor ascend, and it is a pity that I didn't do so more.

Almost all the pictures I did were on the smaller side. I tried working larger but it did not often work out. It felt that the city, in its structured intensity, needed a tighter scale, to suggest that sense of containment. 

View west from above Ellery Street, oil on card, 16 x 18 cm

This is a view down from the roof (above), and you can see how there were grand apartment blocks, then there are little gaps where they constructed some post war clapperboard stuff, quite sadly and petit-bourgeois in comparison, as if implanted from a distant and rather unloved suburb. 

There are gaps all over this part of Brooklyn: empty lots, despite the fact that it is only 15 minutes from the centre. I wonder why no speculator wants to build there? It seemed as good a place to live as any.

Looking Down and north from Ellery Street, Brooklyn, oil on card, 17 x 14 cm  -unavailable

I am attempting to maintain freshness in these pictures and economy of effort. I didn't spend much time on corrections, If a thing did not "take" within twenty minutes, I wiped off the paint and restarted.

This was the view from my room (below). The picture owes something to Matisse. 

One thing I love about New York, and which it shares with Morocco, is that when you are there you have this impression of the squareness of things..or of things that are not quite square meeting nonetheless to form a huge rubric. It is fun to trace this in great blobby brushtrokes so that the parts of the scene before you somehow fits together, and you don't have to amputate a wing of a building  or kid yourself that you were standing in a different position from that you were really in to complete the picture.

View from my room, Bedford-Stuyvesant, oil on card, 14.8 x 14.8 cm  - sold

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