This building, which faces onto the central bus plaza of downtown Providence, has been the home of three or maybe four banks, one after the other, in the ten years I’ve lived here. When I talk about the print I’m working on to people, nobody is exactly certain which bank is the current occupant… but everyone immediately knows the building itself. It’s generally referred to as “the Superman building”, because it supposedly gets leaped over in a single bound in one of the early movies.

In architectural history class years ago, discussing 1920s urbanism, the professor raised the crucial point that Providence didn’t ever actually need setbacks on its single, lonely skyscraper — even now, the downtown density doesn’t warrant them. However, it’s good that they did build this slightly cheesy, mini-Hugh-Ferriss-ian pile of limestone, because it’s the one building that receives unconditional love from everyone who’s ever lived here. Providence’s newer tall buildings (whether from the 1980s or the 2000s), with their flat curtain walls, tend to be universally detested.

I drew it from life in summer 2002, sitting on the steps of the downtown post office for days on end (becoming buddies with the post office security guard in the process). Watching the sun pass over the building during the course of the day, I gleaned some secrets about the uses of recessed and protruding facade elements to cast shadows, enhancing the heavenward directionality. (The photo above is terrible, by the way: it’s taken with my cell phone camera at the cloudy end of a day, so none of the awesome linearity of the building is apparent… I’ll update with a better photo on the next sunny day!)

I used the image to make the above poster design for Dave Cole, which the excellent Neil Burke printed (because I didn’t know anything about printing then, and was totally overwhelmed by the idea of printing 200 posters or however many Dave wanted). I finished cutting out all the super tiny windows totally last-minute, during down-time at my cousin’s wedding in Maine: I have troubled memories of sitting at a folding table, awkward in my fancy clothes, slicing meticulously with the knife, trying desperately not to be distracted by the fun happenings in the next room.

The transparencies, subject of so much precisional distress, are now in pretty rough shape: besides physical damage, check out where the non-archival scotch tape, stuck on to hold tiny straying pieces of rubylith, has actually bled the red color out of the rubylith! I scanned them a couple of months ago, and now I’m working in photoshop to repair some of the damage, and to re-align the shadows and their windows (which, err, may never have been aligned in the first place…). I’m going to be making some new prints of just the building. The main goal of all this computer work is to a) remove the excavator from the image, and b) turn the three colors that delineated the building in the original print (sky blue, purple transparent shadow, yellow transparent darks) into two: a sky color and a transparent shadow color, both of which will be variable. I’ll probably print two editions, each one in a different colorway.

Screenshot! These working colors are not even close to the final colors, don’t worry.

One interesting thing I’ve come up against is that the original pencil drawing is currently misplaced, or possibly lost… in any case, I don’t have it here in Providence. So I’m working from the rubyliths and the print, and from the small cuts that show up in the scans of the transparencies, revealing where I made a tentative drawn line with the knife before pulling all the rubylith away. Zooming-in on the computer allows for much more detailed work than the full-scale physical reality of the transparencies does… but, as Meg noted, I find myself getting totally sucked in to tiny modifications that really won’t show up so much in the final print. Is that the requisite trade-off?

A question for you all: I want to have some text at the bottom of the print. My initial instinct is to have it say “Providence”, but that might be too much like these prints I made in ’05. Would it be too similar? Should it just say “PROV”? (The main caveat for that is that there is a restaurant here called “prov”, with an umlaut, that I don’t necessarily want to be promoting…) “PVD”, the airport abbreviation? Should it say nothing? I want it to have some text element, partly because I like drawing interesting letters, partly so I am not simply ripping off my old drawing from the 2002 poster, and especially: so people know it is a specific building in a specific place, not just a classic late-20s-style setback skyscraper!

Thoughts on that text question would be much appreciated. To give you all some context, the purpose of this print is two-fold, like the purpose of the “Providence” prints from ’05. Purpose #1 is to sell them and make money, because I am in pretty sore need of it after a summer of not making much money. Purpose #2, which is on at least equal standing with the first one, is to create a seminal image that people will hang on their walls, love, and associate with the city they love. [Additionally, I might someday use it to realize one of Julian’s clever ideas from 2001 or so… but more on that later!]

In other news, I got new glasses finally and a new cell phone cause the old one broke, I’m working on multiple projects at once which is challenging and enjoyable at this point (aka, before the deadlines are close), and the past couple of weeks have been beautiful weather; fall is perfect. I’m very excited to be reading Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy — the intricacy of the language forces me to read extremely slowly, it’s great. Also I’m making plans to travel to New Orleans and possibly Arizona and Utah in the winter… a Working Vacation during which I will make lots of drawings, and hopefully at least one print! Any recommendations on places or buildings to check out?

off of Brook St., a couple of weeks ago…