Untitled (City)
Medium: Alcohol Marker and Chalk Pencil
Date: 2023
Project/Body of Work: Ongoing Private Illustrated Manuscript Project
A marker illustration of a crowded market street, structured around filtered light and shadow falling through overhead lattice. Figures move through the narrow passage, forms loosely defined and partially absorbed into the surrounding architecture.
The scene reads clearly as a street, but the composition is driven by the movement of light across the space, the shifting contrast between brightness and shadow organizing the crowd, the buildings, and the depth of the corridor.
Process Notes:
Like many of the pieces in this project, this one emerged from the form sketching process. The goal wasn’t to represent a specific place, but to feel out a container that held a particular internal place and time. The light, the density of the crowd, and the narrow passage all work together to create a sense of movement through something familiar but not entirely fixed.
While the drawing is certainly readable as a street scene, it equally represents an internal landscape — the half-remembered or recognized presence of a place. The idea of the city as a kind of presence shows up throughout my work: city or landscape as a soul-carrying, embodied container of memory, time, and experience.
The scene addresses that relationship between people and place, where streets and walls can feel as conscious and recognizable as any individual within them. In that sense, it became a kind of meditation on that relationship (light and shadow, place and inhabitant) and on the inseparable nature of one from the other.
Nearby Coordinates
Other creative works that explore a similar sense of place, atmosphere, or underlying theme.
