Painting the Urban Landscape

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

When talking about landscape painting, we don’t often consider the urban landscape, but for those painters who live in cities and urban areas, it can be a challenge to find any natural landscape to paint at all. Resourcefulness and a bit of daring are sometimes called for when the view is obscured by buildings or only visible from a structure located in a busy area.

Although the photo above was taken in a rare quiet moment, my location was a busy walkway on a bridge spanning a major river in the Midwest. Because there is also a dam below the bridge, there are hydro-power plants and other industrial and city office buildings blocking both shorelines. While it was an advantage to be able to use this bridge to set up looking down the middle of the river, it was a disadvantage to be on a busy pedestrian walkway on a heavily trafficked bridge. Fortunately, there was a low concrete wall which protected me from the traffic moving at 40 mph a few feet away, but the distractions of the traff…