Air City comes from a fantasy I've always had about a community of parachutes, both buildings and individual people. Are the people weightless within the buildings and platforms? It's a leisurely place, held in equilibrium, easy to glide between houses. The city is several kilometres wide and tall, but not dense, with plenty of space between parachutes.
Moon Dog Knight came from listening to an old recording of the outsider musician/composer, Moon Dog. His style was unique, somewhat out of time. Blind, he roamed around midtown Manhattan in the 50s and 60s. The recording was live, performed in a hall of the Knights of Pythias. It was percussive and enigmatic, and it called up a vision immediately, especially because I have long been fascinated by the secretive fraternal order of Pythias, which seems to have expired. I have a collection of old 1920s/30s era certificates from the Knights of Pythias, which I got from the attic where I lived for a time (the building had long been occupied by other businesses, the Pythian artefacts forgotten.) The ornamentation and mystery of these certificates, coupled with the mystery of the almost forgotten Moon Dog, evoked a sudden vision that I had to paint.
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