Viewing page 33 of 36

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

3

I used to have a room I loved on the south side of Washington Square, with two huge windows facing north from which I looked out upon what for me was the face of the city, and in this series of pictures I tried to set down the effect of different seasons and different times of day upon those buildings. In six of these pictures I have been concerned with capturing the tonal change in colors of the same surfaces under different lights. There are three twin sets here. The West Towers under string warm afternoon sunlight in September, and on a listless sunless day late in October. The skyline in the clear, sharp-edged light of early morning, and in the violet-thickening, blurring light of late afternoon. The East Towers in the orange light of an autumn sunset, and in the crisp, bright light of a winter morning.

But there is more here, I hope, than merely a record of atmospheric changes. A view that you look at many, many times, in moods of hope and discouragement and wonder, enters into your being more penetratingly than a view you only look at once or twice. When the time comes to put a well-known view on paper, all those other times of looking at it mysteriously enter into the act of creation which takes place. At the time I did the first of these pictures I did not yet know whether this new subject---buildings----was a subject for which I had any special affinity. After doing two or three such studies I came to feel that it was, that architecture appealed to an architectural tendency in my mind, the tendency to construct a unity out of many details. I continued with the subject because I felt that it was a subject for me.

The striving for unity of tone in colors which motivated these pictures has resulted in compostions [[compositions]] that, if shown in a group exhibition, could easily be killed by strident colors in some other pictures hung near them. A lyric effect, no matter how well accomplished, has trouble in competing with a dynamic effect, even if the latter be less well accomplished. This picture of the rotunda, for example, would be a dangerous picture to send to a group show, for it is almost a monotone in color, and has no light and shade pattern at all; everything here depends on the linear design and the rhythm achieved by these line. The actual placing of the paint on the