'City of Glass 15- (Stillman walks..)' selected for The Discerning Eye

 

The exhibition is at the Mall Galleries in London, (admission is free) and opens Thurs 13 November until Sunday 23 November 2014. This years selectors were artists Emma Green and Emma Stibbon RA, collectors Charles Ingram and Dr Giles Brown, and critics Simon Martin and Helen Sumpter,

 

Here are my thoughts at the time of making:

 

'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' *

 

*from 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster