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“Living right in the heart of Tokyo itself is quite like living in the mountains – in the midst of so many people, one hardly sees anyone.”
― Of Dogs and Walls
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This is a new painting, a 24″ by 24″ canvas, that was inspired in part by the older painting I showed here last week, Raise Your Eyes. Unlike my normal Red Roof structures which have a closed off feel without doors or windows, these cityscapes are all doors and windows.
All eyes, ears, and mouths.
But as the late, esteemed Japanese writer Yuko Tsushima described in the words above, even with the presence of so many buildings filled with so many people, there is often a sense of anonymity. Perhaps it is the scale of the buildings which sometimes seem like looming mountains that overshadow anything beneath them. Or maybe it is the sheer number of people, so many that the faces and shapes blend into an amorphous blur in passing.
I’m not sure exactly what it is that gives this sense of anonymity but I find the paradox in it fascinating. Maybe that’s one reason why I enjoy painting these pieces so much. The main reason I believe is in the focus required in putting these together. Starting at the bottom of the canvas with no predetermined endpoint in mind, the picture rises slowly with each new structure leading to the next, all the while trying to ascertain how each new move changes the weight and feel of the whole.
Every stroke is a solution to one problem and the beginning of the next.
For me, the result is kind of like looking inside my head. It resembles a jumble, sometimes sloppy and tangled. But somehow, through the mess, it is always trying to create a sense of wholeness, of rightness.
Trying to find order in chaos.
Sometimes, I find it. Sometimes, I don’t.
I am still not sure this painting is finished. I am calling it for time being Around the Clock but for a time had considered calling it Witnesses or Hit and Run. I saw it with a body on the pavement of the intersection at the bottom right of the piece. and maybe a silhouette or two in the windows that look out on it. But I am not sure that I want to add that narrative thread, not sure that I want to change what I am looking at now in that manner.
So, I will dwell on it for a bit before I do anything. Or don’t.
We shall see…
Redtree Times 
If it were me (and it isn’t) I wouldn’t put anything in that intersection. There’s something about experiencing a place usually full of people and activity as utterly empty that’s unlike any other. I’m thinking of a hospital at 3 a.m., or a grade school during summer vacation, or a church on Thursday afternoon.
The painting sets up the same feeling of vertigo, the same resonance. Well, for me, anyway.
That is kind of what I was thinking– adding those figures might actually detract from the whole.
The only possible exception might be a single leaf from the Red Tree, lying there as though blown in from some distant hill. But the fact that I imagined that suggests that leaving the space empty for others to populate as they will might be a good thing.
I love it. I love it the way it is .If you add anything …One small shadow of a person approaching on the payment right below the gray block sign. Or the small building to the left of the center the buildings with the tiny circular window at the top, you could add a silhouette of a person in the side top window . Just a thought. You are still a great inspiration to me.
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Windows are like unseeing eyes. There is a feeling of anonymity about those buildings — reminding me of that sad phrase we in these parts use about people: The lights are on but nobody’s home. I think I like your windowless houses better. I think of them as “place markers.” — Here is an important place.
They are definitely very different but each has its own anonymity. One, the windowless house, feels like a quiet, self-imposed privacy whereas the tangle of windows and doors in the cityscape creates a paradoxical anonymity in its crowds and corners and open windows.