Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center, Original “Monochromatic Collage”

Pittsburgh's Gateway Center, Monochromatic Collage Original

And now for something completely different from yesterday (and the day before).

This is a medium and style I had enjoyed as sculptures and 3-D “drawings” in college which I called “monochromatic collage” wherein I build the image in 3-D using materials with texture and pattern to create the parts of the scene, though often the scene was totally abstract. I’d then paint it all over with, usually, white gesso, but often other colors of opaque matte-finish paint, always one solid color to really enhance the textures.

In this case, it was another image for “100 West Busway” This is Gateway Center, one of the first things you see as you come out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel and cross the Fort Pitt Bridge. You see the two main hotels in downtown Pittsburgh in the backgound and in the foreground the trees of Point State Park surrounding the historic remains of Fort Pitt and the blockhouse as well as the Point and its fountain at the very spot the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio.

I created this work for an exhibit I had in 2006 entitled “100 West Busway“, featuring 125 thumbnail photos of Pittsburgh taken through the bus window on the round-trip journey from Carnegie and back on the 100 West Busway route, running from the south hills into downtown Pittsburgh, through the east end and Oakland and all the colleges and research centers, back into downtown and back to the suburbs.

From the 125 thumbnails I created a dozen works, each in a different medium, all framed with black wood frames and white mats. This is one of those pieces, and is actually one of the originals from the show.

This collage is 8″ x 10″ in a 14″ x 16″ raised-profile 1.25″ matte-finish black frame with a e” white mat, ready for hanging, available in my shop on Etsy in my gallery for Pittsburgh Art and Photos.