The Skyscraper and the City brings together thirty years of the artist’s watercolor images of cities. LePan’s work goes against the tradition of presenting skyscrapers with a hard and precise verticality; the lines of these towers blur and bleed into each other, into the sky and the natural world, and often into the human life of the city. In their sense of movement, these watercolor images (of bridges and baseball stadiums as well as of skyscrapers) at times recall the work of John Marin, while in their viewpoint they may bring to mind the bird’s-eye-view city paintings of Oskar Kokoschka or John Hartman. LePan’s paintings have been exhibited only once—in a solo show in Brooklyn in 2008. Commenting on that exhibition, Hartman (whose sweeping canvasses have been acclaimed world-wide) described these watercolor works as “very good, and together they form a coherent and focused body of work.”
The Skyscraper and the City includes images from as far afield as Cape Town, London, and Sydney, but the primary focus is on the North American city. Calgary, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, and Vancouver are each the subject of numerous paintings; in all, over fifty cities are represented.
Substantial captions accompanying many of the images discuss the circumstances in which the work was painted, various aesthetic issues, and the architectural history of the buildings depicted. An appendix includes examples of the artist’s preliminary sketches and photographs. In a brief introduction, LePan discusses the history of skyscraper art, the nature of watercolor as a medium, and his own background as a watercolor painter.
