For an office building in Long Island City, NYC, I was asked to create a mural on their largest lobby wall that would incorporate the surrounding neighborhood into its theme. Since one of my favorite New York structures, the Queensboro Bridge, sat just a few blocks away, I asked to see the view from the building’s rooftop. To my amazement, the building’s west facing edge was just feet away from an on-ramp (with clear directional signs), the towers of the bridge dramatically receding in perspective. I understood that the level of parallelism and proportionality would be daunting to reproduce straight onto a sheetrock wall, but also saw an opportunity, so I went ahead with the proposal and mural of this subject. I gridded the wall and drew the entire composition in pencil, freehand, while looking at a 20-inch-wide print of a photo I’d taken from the roof, adding acrylic color afterwards.
I aimed for accuracy and a satisfyingly physcal effect— to express the magnitude of the city’s dimensions with a sense of its deep historicity. Usually, such structures are experienced from a car, on the move, in flux. I wanted to allow the viewer the opportunity to marvel at the effects of this bridge in more hushed conditions.