'City of Glass 15- (Stillman walks.....)' 50x40cms

 

 

This is the smallest painting yet in the New York Trilogy series. It's always a problem going from big to small - there is no room, no space! - but I think that problem has been resolved. 

In this painting I returned to the idea of how to place both the figure of Stillman and the map-shape of Manhattan in the same painting, without Stillman appearing giant.  The painting started with Stillman in a gallery, walking past a painting containing the Manhattan shape ('City of Glass 1') but the verticality, which has been a constant throughout the series, was missing. I think the solution above is far more intriguing and ambiguous.  The vertical grid on the right is a specific section of the Upper West Side. As 'detective' Quinn discovers, Stillman's daily walks, (where he invisibly writes the letters that spell T.H.E.T.O.W.E.R.O.F.B.A.B.E.L.) are all within 'a narrowly circumscribed area, bounded on the north by 110thSt, on the south by 72nd Ave, on the west by Riverside Park, and on the east by Amsterdam Avenue. No matter how haphazard his journeys- and each day his itinerary was different- Stillman never crossed these borders' *

 

Next painting: 'City of Glass 16 - (1 block = 1 brick)', investigating again the enormous scale of the new Tower of Babel in New York, which would be 'large enough to hold every inhabitant of the New World'.*

 

*Paul Auster  'The New York Trilogy'