Pamela Lawton

Alchemy In Situ


“The trip was … one of risk … no one is allowed to sketch alive there … an artist who ventured there was shot while attempting a sketch … I flung open my sketchbook and drew the scene roughly … we then dashed down the path and seized another view and so on sketching and running...”[1] Frederic Edwin Church thus describes snatching a sketch in Petra.
Frederic Edwin Church, landscape, Niagra Falls, Thomas Cole, Hudson River School

Mod Metropolis


“There are perfectly sober people who will tell you they have seen high buildings shimmy.”
 “(Modern buildings) show their best to their devotees… (who) will point out to you a score of fleeting expressions in a façade.” Orrick Johns. “What the Modish Building Will Wear.”New York Times, Oct. 4, 1925.
Hugh Ferriss, Architecture, New York City, drawing, conté, Pamela Lawton

Echoes of Techno


In Niklaus Troxler’s abstraction, green and yellow bands pulsate on black. Rectangular slivers of shapes draw the viewer across and down. Diagonal paths form along the way. Reinforced by its title, Echoes of Techno, the image emits rhythm and sound, progressing over time.
Niklaus Troxler, jazz, posters, New York City, Jazz Willisau, Switzerland, techno, graphic design

Scena Per Angolo, or Advance Through Indirection


My love of Italian architecture came about while I was a student in Urbino and then Florence. A displaced New Yorker, I succumbed to the daily euphoria induced by my walk from my apartment to the Scuola Lorenzo de Medici. Every wall, doorway and piazza vied for my attention with outdoor statuary, Della Robbia roundels, frescoes and inlays. 
Italy, theater, Bibiena, perspective, drawings, baroque, Renaissance

The Meeting of Modern Minds


In Alvin Lustig’s cover design for Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, one shape moves by the other, led by its emanation. Rising to the surface, from field to foreground, negative space turns positive. Infinite mutations form a continuum that is hard-edged yet sensuous.
Alvin Lustig, Ezra Pound, New Directions, poetry, book cover design, Black Mountain College, modernism