Downtown

This piece has heavy texture in places. This texture comes from building up heavy layers of paint, which provides a rich history for the piece, not all of which is always visible. The piece is finished with a coat of satin varnish, which helps protect the painting over time. The painting has a satin finish. A certificate of authenticity is included with the piece in an envelope. There is a small section in the left center area where the clear varnish pooled a little. This is only visible when the canvas is tilted under a strong light and doesn't affect normal viewing.

In this intuitive piece, I continue to explore using a brayer — a cylindrical roller tool used in printmaking — to apply micro-thin layers of pigment on top of other color layers, in an attempt to create vibrant complementary color sizzle. I love the brayer because it fits well with the lightning fast pace at which I paint. I also love the rectilinear shapes that it creates, which work well in cityscapes, which are rectangular in nature to begin with. One interesting technique I used here was to incorporate the shape of the wooden stretcher bars that support the canvas into the composition itself. As I rolled the brayer across the section of canvas with stretcher bars, they created rectangular marks in the paint that went well with this urban theme, so I leaned into that and incorporated that directly into the composition.