Bike Lane

Bike Lane, Brooklyn Bridge

40x50 oil 2014

I had fun with this summer scene set at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge during summer. This area is chaotic, a bottle neck of pedestrians who are sometimes confused about the walking lanes vs. the biking lanes.

I wanted to compare and contrast the milling people and congested traffic with the more imposing, immobile gothic towers of the bridge ahead. I wonder if the biker will manage to find his way forward without breaking. This is an atypical scene to paint, full of day lit colors and human anecdote and incident-- a challenge for me.

Brooklyn Bridge, Stone and Iron

80x60 oil 2012

The Brooklyn Bridge says much. It shows architectural tradition in its massive masonry and gothic arches. Unlike England's Houses of Parliament (built roughly in the same Gothic Revival era), the bridge is without filigreed refinement. The unadorned arches look more like functional flying buttresses. Instead of buttressing a cathedral, however, they stand fulcrum to hundreds of steel cables holding modern suspension bridge.  They weld together stone and iron, old and new, completing a masterpiece of engineering.

There's much even in the very name The Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn: who has not lived there, at least for a time? The bridge made it possible for New York to later annex the borough, enriching the city's wealth of ideas and innovation. These innovations and visions have shaped the nation and the world.

The bridge is a unique icon, sui generis. It reflects the nation better than the classicism of the U.S. Capitol (elegant as it is), or the rote egyptomania of the Washington monument.

 The Brooklyn Bridge would be very suitable for use on a new currency, should the U.S. ever be forced to redesign the look of its dollar. (Think of the way the Euro was forced to avoid a face of any one nation, in favor of nameless architectural details.)