Paved with Gold

I was taking long walks through New York City; grime and glitter, glass and iron, duality at every turn. High rise buildings, warehouses, unexpected gardens spilling out between nooks and crannies in the city's walls. Listening, I could hear trains beneath me, planes above me, trucks rumbling by. Turning another corner and the sound would evaporate into air and birdsong. I drew a landscape of New York, not as it exists in any physical sense, but in a sweeping, sensory summary. Lines and rectangles colliding, each a duplicate of the last. Between angular clusters I drew the curved shapes of birds, untethered in the air, sometimes spilling out between blocks, or soaring right over the building clusters. I put a pin in that drawing, right above my desk, and began to compose the shape of that abstract skyline. An orchestral landscape, loud and unbridled, paved with gold.