Online greenlight review

Invisible cities

SANDY E

O CTO B E R 2 0 1 8
BAUCIS THUMBNAILS 9 - 15
BAUCIS THUMBNAILS 16 - 21
BAUCIS THUMBNAILS 22 - 27
BAUCIS THUMBNAILS 28 - 35
“AFTER A SEVEN days’ march through woodland, the
traveller directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet
he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at
a great distance from one another and are lost above the
clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On
the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having
already everything they need up there, they prefer not to
come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except
those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days
are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.

There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis:

that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they
avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they
existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward
they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone,
ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own
absence.”
I chose the city of Baucis as I felt drawn to the concept of a world that is out of sight, hidden
from view. I imagine the city to be a source of comfort to the inhabitants as they “prefer not
to come down”, and I aim to reflect this in the use of soft textures for the interior view,
where they spend their time observing the world beneath them with their spyglasses. The
idea that the city has been raised above the clouds, supported only by stilts immediately
evoked a sense of scale and enormity that would lend itself well to the low angle viewpoint
painting.
I tried a few different approaches to my thumbnails, some more playful than others. By
using a messier style, I have loosened up my work in a more organic nature, which I prefer
to use. I would like to exaggerate the idea of the city living on flamingo legs by using pink
tones for the stilts. The shadows cast by the city are angular, so the architecture will need to
reflect this, using more geometric shapes rather than some of my initial, softer sketches. As
the city is intended to blend in amongst the setting of a woodland, I intend to use some vivid
colours for the foliage at the forefront of my paintings, so that the pink stilts do not look so
out of place, but also to create a curious and fun world of colour.