Downtown City Hall oil painting
on Dec 11 by alinquist55
a city view of the city hall building for sale at fine art gallery of realism
CITY HALL, canvas size:30” x 40”
City Hall is a painting dominated by a large, 10-story, 19th century building on the left side of the painting. Sun shines on the façade while the shadow of another building starts to creep upon it. Go towards the painting’s right, a series of buildings stand and between them is city traffic and traffic lights. Closer, the street and a meridian with planted geraniums lay before the viewer.
I wanted to paint downtown buildings with the shadows of late afternoon falling across the streets and onto the buildings. I like the way the shadows and the sunlit facades create a jarring form of contrast at strange angles but doing so requires timing. I also wanted to continue to work on painting traffic, pedestrians and the usual ground objects of city streets. Still, painting the architectural details and linear structure of a building like this consumes a lot of time.
This painting took most of a summer to paint. I started in late spring and adjusted the time that I painted so that the shadows would fall at about the same places. Of course, some days are cloudy, paint needs to set and there are other things and other paintings in a person’s life, so I was not down there every day.
Despite the commanding presence of city hall, I left out a fair amount of detail and that’s one of the things I like about the painting. There is a lot of detail, but I did attempt to generalize a lot of it and, instead, tried to focus on the linearity of the building’s design and how the late afternoon shadows fell upon it. I also wanted to focus on the traffic and it’s flow, as well as the ever-present traffic lights and street lights with civic banners hanging from them. For once, I was able to paint in pedestrians.
This would be the last large-scale painting I would attempt, although I can’t say that I won’t do one in the future. Although the scale of a painting like this can be overwhelming, it is the time it takes to do one that I really try to avoid.
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