Sept. 11 Art Talk
On Wednesday night I went to the New-York Historical Society to catch a presentation by Christopher Evans, the artist who created "In the Light of Memory." I first saw the painting (and blogged about it) about a year after Sept. 11 and was impressed with it then. On a giant Plexiglas sphere, he painted the 360-degree view from the top of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. The precision of the rendering is incredible. "I did try to be accurate. There's very little artistic license," he said Wednesday.

Evans said he worked for six months on the project. "It was 9 to 6, punching in, everyday." He said he started in the morning and would leave the radio on all day, starting with the Brian Lehrer show in WNYC. (Lehrer just started a blog.) He talked about the difficulty of representing "New York's recta-linear design onto a sphere" and described how he had to create new artist tools from foamrubber to adapt to the spherical canvas.

Evans referred to David Hockney's "Pearblossom Highway," Picasso's cubist rendering of his home town Horto de Ebro in 1909 and the techniques of the Impressionists as influences for this work.

"I was also aware that it was going to stand as a historical document of how the city once looked," he said.

Evans said he hopes the sphere will eventually be moved to an interim or permanent museum at Ground Zero.

You really do get an eerie feeling when you see it. In part, it's odd because you are getting the 360-degree view by looking in yet it's the view you would have seen while looking out. And of course, it revives all the emotions of loss. Evans read a letter he received from a woman after she and her husband viewed the work. The letter said the husband worked on the 95th floor of the South Tower and had been late for work that day. She said 87 of his firm's 650 employees were killed Sept. 11. Evans' work was "so healing to both of us," the letter said.
- posted by Amy @ 4/23/2004 10:44:00 AM