Slouching Toward Jerusalem

One afternoon, Tucker and I were drinking percolator coffee and avoiding errands, when he suggested that we take a look at his collection of photos from his academically-guided trip to Israel and other areas near the Red Sea. What followed was a Spielberg-like tour through Petra (a.k.a. the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) in Jordan, and a kibbutz* in Israel on Tucker’s monitor. Amid the comedy, danger, and sand, this shot of the city of Jerusalem struck me. It shows the eastern, or Arab side of Jerusalem, an area of relatively new development. The buildings and their glinting windows and green mosque lights coat the side of the hill like bright scales. Urban landscapes appeal to me, especially ones where space seems so precious that every inch could be the subject of a possible dispute. This interest may be tied to my upbringing in Alaska, where the land is so plentiful, people get tired just looking at it, let alone deciding what to do with it after they've managed to walk across it.

To compensate for the fact that you haven't seen the preceding Israel photos to set the mood, please find something in iTunes composed by John Williams, James Horner, or Howard Shore, and play it while you fullscreen this. If you own music authentic to the region, even better.

Tucker's mother, Karen, who is a more active painter than I, has based much of her recent work on specimens from his photo collection. Karen has sold me on the use of acrylic glazes to create an iridescence like that of oil paints. For this painting, I decided to work in light glazes on a dark background, as I enjoyed the way the geometric figures of the mosques rose from the shadows of the hillside in twilight.

I began the painting on masonite board because I like the way acrylics spread on its smooth surface. I drew a grid on the printed photo and the board to enlarge the details proportionally—not that I was going for realism outright. I cut out a good portion of the sky and below the streetlight in order to focus on the buildings. My focus was the geometric shapes rising to form the hillside surface. As I began work on the left side of my drawing, however, I felt a creeping sense of panic. The shapes felt two-dimensional, and unreflective of the richness of the photo.

But as I worked my way to the right and the buildings took on more of an angle, my use of lighter colors for the building fronts (which were sometimes difficult to pick out in the photo) and my ability to “draw” with the negative space between buildings threw in a sense of depth.

I wanted to add even more depth by using a box frame, and stubbornly insisted on building it myself in spite of my negligible competence with carpentry. I have recently purchased a (wood) router in order to carve grooves so that my slender masonite could rest within the box without shifting around. I probably should have started with a smaller painting for my first frame (this one is about 49” wide), but the fit was suprisingly precise for a first try.

As I slid the grooved frame pieces around the masonite board, I became more and more forgiving of the flaws of my rendering, so obvious to me when I was peering closely at it. The frame collected the painting's details smartly into a single piece that almost resembles the photo's unified impact. Yes, almost.

Is it pretentious to hang a painting in your living room of a place you’ve never visited? Too late.

* A kibbutz is a communal farm in the lower part of Israel, in Tucker's case, in the Negev Desert.