Older Shops and Offices, An Oil Painting

Cityscape of a strip of shops and offices with cars parked out front

OLDER SHOPS AND OFFICES,canvas size: 24 x 36

On the painting’s horizon is a row of postwar office buildings with cars parked in front of them. In front of this setting lies a four-lane city street with a grassy meridian. Rising from the meridian are two streetlights. On the near side of the road is a copper colored car. The entire painting tilts down to the left. Above all of this is a nice blue sky.

Generally, paintings are conceived on horizontal and vertical lines but repeating this pattern too often gets repetitious. Photography shows a variation when people shoot photos of landscapes and cityscapes at odd angles, caused either by bad camera work, boredom or creativity. I wanted to paint these buildings but not in a way that would create a visually static horizon.

These buildings are the commercial remains of a thriving 1950’s economy that had once happened in my old neighborhood. At one time it was all very shiny and new, people came from all over to shop in this general area and it was still new enough when I lived there to display it’s fading postwar tastes in an age and neighborhood that preferred hip hop.

There is a lot of color in the buildings; the window panels are turquoise and light blue and the awnings are candy striped red and white. The cars of businessmen who still worked there and were nearing retirement reflect a 1990’s taste in automotive color and the simple designs that reflected the architecture of older times appear in various shades of neutral. The streetlights, the tall, blue sign with individual letters and the broken sign near the middle bisect this long, sloping horizon, although the horizon levels off at the bottom. The near side curbing counters this slope, as does the shadow at the bottom.

This painting was painted in the heat of summer and, to me, it shows it. Again, I painted this view from the edge of my van in a grocery store parking lot. One of the store’s grocery carts even appears at the far left. That seemed to be a popular place to leave the carts and an interesting visual brake that prevents the view from following the road off the canvas.

For some unknown reason, in this painting, the streetlights fascinate me. They stand tall with their arching lamps spread wide. It counters the general horizontal trend of the painting. But as the lights rise so high, they seem to exist in their own space, far away from the street. I also like the color and atmosphere of the buildings. They still thrive although their days of influence are long gone.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting