Architecture of the City
Many of my paintings have as their subject the architecture of the city, an emphasis on urban forms and how our experience of the city can be shaped by imagination and collective memory. My focus has been on Italian and French cities, providing me abundant sources of inspiration. A uniquely recognizable feature of Italian cities is the polarity between city and countryside: the contrast between the natural space of the landscape and the urban space defined by the architecture. In these cities one can experience an architecture that endures in history and in the memories of the people. Cities evolve and this evolution is inspired and grounded in human experience. These urban artifacts engage the landscape, climate and light of its place and shape our emotional response.
To me architecture is identified with the city and cannot be defined without it. There is a relationship between a specific location and the surrounding buildings that shapes our experience. Monuments such as towers, cathedrals, palaces and urban facades are intertwined with artisan workshops, neighbourhoods, alleys and marketplaces. There are social hierarchies but also public spaces. This provides a background for everyday life and at the same time provides frames, horizons and settings for experiencing our place in the world. In the ancient world through the Renaissance this context was shaped by painters, sculptors and architects who in turn were shaped by their cities. A tension was created between the perceived architecture and the continuous refinement of the architecture imagined. The ideal cities envisioned by Renaissance painters as a place for architecture are particularly inspiring. Here the idealized human construction takes on general values of place and memory.
Cities are filled with a permanence that we experience as a spatial unity using all our senses and that allows us to ponder urban life. The order of these spaces and how they are structured leads to a precision of form that is symbolic of the meaning of the architecture of the city. An analogy is the form of shells which are fascinating in the way natural forces give shape to a precise form. Just as the markings on the shell reveal how it was made, so too the textures of buildings reveal the craft involved in shaping urban spaces
Perspective as Form
When painting plein air I am faced with how to portray the perceived space on a two-dimensional surface. The illusion of distance in a painting can be achieved in several ways. The overlapping of forms will indicate which object is closer. As elements recede their relative size diminishes. And the use of contrast, soft versus hard edges, less detail, cooler or muted colours are additional strategies that give depth and have been employed since at least the time of Leonardo. In painting cityscapes, there are often buildings at oblique angles or at varied elevations. The use of a horizon and vanishing points in perspective construction is required to accurately convey the visual experience.
A camera, of course, can be used to provide a single point of view, but I find it more helpful to establish by eye where the horizon and vanishing points lie. Using a one-point perspective in street or city square scenes there is the possibility to unify the space and provide a focus to the composition. Painting building exteriors in two-point perspective the composition can be unified by the correct proportion of elements such as arches, window openings or other architectural details as they recede and are repeated.
Perspective is a factor of style and can be characterized as giving meaning to forms. The artistic value of a painting does not necessarily rely on perspective construction nor on its relative perfection. However, through history different perspectives have been used so there is an element of choice in its construction and use.
The Renaissance invention of using a visual pyramid intersecting the picture plane was able to bring an abstract and logical method into harmony with traditional usage. This led to its adoption by painters. Where earlier paintings had been aesthetically unified, the use of perspective construction succeeded in creating a mathematically rationalized image within a unified framework.
With perspective it is possible to construct an unambiguous and consistent spatial structure of infinite extension. It provides a generally valid and mathematically justifiable rule to determine how far things stand from each other or how closely they cohere. In so doing it creates an intelligent composition.
Try to imagine what perspective meant to Leonardo or to the imagination of Uccello. It unified art and science by transforming a subjective visual impression to the foundation of an infinite experiential world. Although perspective distorts the true proportions of objects (turning rectangles into trapezoids and circles into ellipses), it constructs a harmonious pictorial space by ordering the visual space we actually experience.