“Hey Pete, can I ask you about the construction cranes?

Me: “Sure. What would you like to know?”

“What’s the deal with all them cranes?”

Well, to backtrack a bit from this resulting painting, over the past few years I’ve been continually drawn to taking photos of cityscapes with layers of buildings and cranes off in the distance. Some days I’ll go out with my camera and see what I can find…and almost every time I end up snapping yet another bunch of photos of these areas under construction.

I wanted to really capture and interpret the collective scale and density of these scenes on canvas. Especially the seemingly unending high rise projects—many of them only part finished for years—punctuated by cranes jutting above the roof tops. The repetition and smoggy layers of cityscape really have an aesthetic quality that begs to be brought to life in a painting so I went for it, using a huge one meter square canvas that seemed ideal for this. Perhaps I will create a few more pieces to make a solid series out of this theme.