The Form and Content of European Cities as Paintings

Abstract

This practice-led research project investigates how ideas about urban theory, mapping and architectural drawing can be engaged in the process of painting in portraying European cities. The resulting conjunction is generative of paintings which record and convey figurative and abstracted information about urban human activity. This research has its genesis in the theoretical underpinning of the work of contemporary painters such as Julie Mehretu and Mark Bradford. Their paintings, combine some of the objective information of a conventional map together with painterly information portraying a personal interpretation of places, spaces and human activity. These paintings, described by art historian Kathryn Brown as absorptive maps, employ allegoric graphic protocols to provide subjectively generated imagery. In my research, the generation of allegorical painterly protocols is guided by the theoretical ideas about cities of Elizabeth Grosz, Gaston Bachelard and Machiel Karskens. The works are also informed by Lewis Mumford’s idea of city development as a kind of palimpsest where one layer informs the next. Responding to this conceptual framework my paintings begin with sketchbook and memory records of urban wandering and develop as an amalgam of recognisable mapping and highly personal abstracted imagery. This imagery incorporates my recollections of European cities, and my knowledge of and responses to them acquired over time. The works are a painterly palimpsest where the flux of the present is informed by layers of history, using painterly processes of layering, transparency and line work assembled in a pictorial space based on an axonometric projection system drawn from my architectural practice. These works add to understandings of contemporary painting that responds to the complexity of modern urban life. By combining techniques of mapping and architectural drawing with those of painterly observation the paintings explore the duality of the generalised geometric structure of cities and the specificity of intuitive painterly marks. Through this exploration, the paintings translate the results of human activity and urban development as abstracted painterly elements, linear marks and geometric motifs.