Artist Reflects on City Visions
“Curved Reality” is an exhibition of paintings by New York artist Pamela Lawton. It is an unusual show of New York City vistas that takes the urban architecture culture of New York and creates a painterly visual experience. Lawton’s work uses form and color to depict a reality that is usually given photographic treatment. Her large scale paintings (such as the 48 x 36 “180ML, SE, IV”) find landscapes and fantasies in the hard glass reality of skyscraper window reflections.
Lawton has developed a new way of sight-seeing and architectural interpretation. She explained her innovative approach to “Sunday Painting” creativity as personal, contemporary response to city life: “I noticed the architecture, kind of ‘70s architecture, tends to have distorted glass.”
In the early days of the World Trade Center, Lawton once had a studio there and recalled its inspiration: “I was also experiencing the kind of vertical vertigo that you” get when you’re in the World Trade Center, you know, that kind of ‘woosh‘ of the elevator and the swaying of the building. And so I wanted to include that in my work as well.”
More elemental experiences also figure in Lawton’s work such as “Outside Oceania 2,” an 2010 oil on canvas work, that turns urban reflection into visualized undulations that suggests waves of heat and ripples of flags. Lawton transforms the concrete into the purely imagistic.
