Landscapes

When I was 18, I visited New York City for the first time and we did the town. We did everything there was to do on the tourist agenda, and then some. It was a wonderful trip, but as I looked down the giant caverns of Manhattan, seeing that no sunlight fell on the midday streets, I was totally shocked: It's just...dead. How can anyone live here?

Fast-forward several years, and I have spent most of my adult life living in various concrete jungles. Sure, sometimes I get upset about the excessive use of concrete, about giant strip malls and ever-expanding parking lots, and I wonder why cities are designed for cars instead of people with, you know, feet instead of wheels. I miss the green, I miss the quiet. But I've come to appreciate the landscape of cities in a way that I didn't when I viewed it with my small-town eyes.

During the weekend, I took the train and spent some time in the Art Institute and in the garden downtown. My destination was the featured exhibition of watercolors by American artist John Marin at the Art Institute. A lot of the press for the exhibition calls him, "The Winslow Homer of his generation." (Errr...yeah. That meant almost nothing to me, except that Mr. Homer is a big, famous American painter.) The paintings are truly special - a jumble of modern shapes and structures, combined with love of nature and bright bursts of color. The Brooklyn Bridge, the coast of Maine, and the Tyrol feature in the show - highly recommended! (Although I still have to plead ignorance on Winslow Homer - I'll look him up later.)

The downstairs gallery is featuring modern works by American photographers, including Berenice Abbot, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White. Again, those names meant almost nothing to me, but I do like black and white photography. The images are primarily from in and around the urban landscapes of New York after the great industrialists got ahold of the building industry. There are Russian men clinging to the face of giant dam structures, and steel workers bowed in the heat of sleek, stories-high steel cylinders. Burke-White's photos look like they all belong on the book jacked for 'The Fountainhead,' expounding the benefits of mass production and metal-based buildings. Abbot's photos are similar, but feature the valleys, tunnels, and chasms created by modern skyscrapers in New York. The lines and shadows are visually stunning in all of them, the excitement of being in New York, of seeing the towering buildings, comes through in all the pieces.

After my visit, I took a walk through the Lurie Gardens and spent some time with the frosty garden plants. The gardener in me is just itching for Spring to make its official arrival, but if the the lack of green in the beds of wildflowers is any sign...we're still many weeks away. I strolled the paths, watching the pink sunset and seeing the signs begin to light up for Saturday night. Looking down the steel and glass cavern created by the Adams street buildings, away toward the glowing sky, the city seemed wholly alive, a jumble of red brick and white stone mountains, rivers of traffic and veins of sinuous train tracks, dotted with clearings of parkland, bordering a wild and icy-green Lake Michigan. Ahhhhh.