Paper Summary:

This paper addresses the rendering of urban landscapes in painting, focusing specifically on the work of contemporary artist Greg Tomezsko. The paper explains that to approach the urban landscape as an aesthetic subject is to deal with powerful exterior influences and reconcile the asserting character of the city with particularized artistic style and expression. The author adds that the urban artist is confronted with the difficulty of "testing themselves against the city, struggling to balance an equation between its indiscriminate physical energies and their own mental superintendence." The paper concludes that the artist is not the anchor of meaning; he is a translator of urban poetics, the individual who has knocked on the city's door and has presented the outpouring of response in a universal human language.

From the Paper:

"For Freud, the subjects that often compel him to paint are individuals with whom he can establish real dialogue, and his experiences of painting are exclusively limited to his understanding of the subject as a finite individual. To extrapolate his treatise to include collective and more complicated entities, such as urban landscapes or urban themes in general, exposes the difficulties of situating the artist in a dialogue with the city. As a multifarious subject, the urban environment seems even more recalcitrant and chimerical than an individual sitter and is a subject already embedded with its own psychic tendencies towards compulsion, mania and other emotional extremities. To approach the urban landscape as an aesthetic subject is to deal with these powerful exterior influences and reconcile the asserting character of the city with particularized artistic style and expression."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Trans. John P. Spencer. 1435-6. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970.
• Caws, Mary Ann, ed. City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1993.
• Crinson, Mark, ed. Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. New York: Routledge, 2005.
• Conrad, Peter. The Art of the City: Views and Visions of New York. New York, Oxford UP, 1984.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

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