Philadelphia



The other night I had a dream that was set in Philadelphia, or in some dream-altered Philadelphia-like place. Part of it was set on Cricket Ave. in Ardmore, where my parents, sister and I lived for a few years in the early 1970’s. It was kind of like Cricket Ave., except, oddly, the sidewalk had a curb that was about two feet high, stepping down to another sidewalk, that had an 8” curb to the street. Who knows why one imagines or remembers such things.

I had been watching John Thornton’s videos on Philadelphia artists, and thinking about my time there, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and afterward.

The image above is a two page spread from one of my sketchbooks from PaFA, with preparatory studies for my painting Portrait in a State Park. I was rehearsing the pose, and thinking about the setting for the painting. My fellow student at PaFA Christina Kelly was kind enough to pose for me. I wanted to make a life size portrait that would fit on a 68”x48” canvas, which was a size that Christina used for some of the figure paintings that she did at PaFA that I admired.

In order to fit the portrait on that size canvas it needed to be a seated pose. I liked the idea that the figure was waiting for a bus, an activity that had been part of my Philadelphia experience, and my previous experience in Boston.

I grew up in the suburbs immediately to the west of Philadelphia, but had been exploring parts of the city to the east, Mt. Airy, Chestnut Hill, Melrose and Elkins Park. In one of those places I came across a sidewalk that was made of large pieces of slate, instead of cement. I loved the colors and depth of the slate, and took an entire roll of photos with a film camera, before I had a digital camera, of the slate sidewalk, that I was thinking about using for the painting.

For the background, I was remembering a landscape painting class that I had taken at PaFA a couple of years previously, when we went out to Valley Forge State Park to paint. Painting there was one of my enjoyable and memorable experiences at PaFA. I liked having a figure waiting for a bus, in the rolling hills of Valley Forge.

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