I painted these small, 5"x5" views of Paris over the past week as studies for a larger painting I'm about to start. These paintings will be sold individually but I couldn't resist mounting the paintings in this beautiful frame. I picked up the frame together with its original painting, an amateur life study which is signed and dated 1929, from a charity shop.
I'm enjoying architectural painting and these miniature Flatiron buildings are my current obsession. Paris has dozens of narrow corner buildings. Most going back to the original Haussmann plan of 1853, but new narrow corner buildings continue to be built to replace old ones as they become derelict.
I very much like these handsome paintings. The building shapes are quite impactful, aren't they. Flaring back from their corner entrances, they seem to have movement, like a train or a Mississippi riverboat.
ReplyDeleteI grew up on a west coast rural / semi-urban grid, so the first time I saw a building shaped like this was in Paris in 1982. I was charmed and can understand why they are your current obsession. Architecture in art can elicit a great deal of response in the viewer. Like the land, it dictates the personality of place.
"Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul."
(Ernest Dimnet, What We Live By)