Activity #2





The painting that I chose is titled Tomorrow I May Be Far Away; painted in 1967 by Romare Bearden. This painting uses both warm and cool colors; and also uses a collage of various papers with charcoal and graphite on canvas. In Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, Bearden reflects on his childhood memories of Mecklenburg County. There is a focus or elevation of the everyday that becomes a frequent motif in both his North Carolina and Harlem imagery. Bearden employed a variety of media to create this collage, including cuttings from magazines, sample catalogs, wallpaper, art reproductions, and painted papers. This collage is broken into pieces, which helps to give it a dense, quilt-like texture. Parts of the surface have also been reworked with spray paint and charcoal or graphite.



John Sloan an American, painted The City from Greenwich Village in 1922. This painting is oil on canvas. The apparent spontaneity in Sloan’s City from Greenwich Village is deceptive. Noting it was “painted from memory,” Sloan made more preparatory studies for this canvas than for any of his other pictures. In this painting we see the distant lights of downtown office buildings amid the gathering darkness of a winter evening. Yellow-green light contrasts dramatically with the plum-colored shades in the sky and the stark black of the buildings. The viewer peers out over Manhattan, where two tall buildings go upward. The curve of the elevated tracks helps to lead our eyes to this destination. Sloan wanted to make a record of the older city that was giving way to the towers of modern New York. In the final oil painting, the railway is pushed down at a steeper perspective, opening the foreground into a vast space of reflections off wet pavement. The soaring Woolworth Building dominates the distant skyscrapers. Since that shimmering vision actually would not have been visible from this low level, the skyline derives from other studies done at higher elevations.