Practice · Format
Drawing the City
The city observed while it is happening.
Drawing the City uses timed observation as a form of urban documentation. Subjects include commuters, cafés, sidewalks, construction, storefronts, public transport, waterfronts, architecture, parks, street life and people passing through public space.
The objective is not to produce carefully rendered architectural scenes. The work records temporary relationships between people, objects, light, movement and place. A figure may leave before the drawing is finished. A train may arrive. A street may suddenly change. The drawing has to respond to those conditions.
Drawing on a platform or a park bench is drawing in public whether or not anyone was invited. Passers-by stop; some stay for the whole sheet. The drawing does not pause for them and the crowd is not the subject, but it is part of the conditions, and it has always gathered.
Over an extended period, repeated observation of the same city becomes a visual archive of social, seasonal and architectural change. Jersey City and its neighbourhoods, the waterfront and the PATH are the immediate subject; a long stay lets a substantial body of place-based work accumulate organically.
