Bridge Paintings

Bridges are the defining quality of civilization; where there is no bridge crossing, there is no civilization.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, my earliest adventures were carved out beneath the city’s massive infrastructure—in the shadows of elevated trains, expressways, overpasses, and monumental bridges. As a student of both painting and history, I have come to see these structures as much more than engineering marvels. They are physical manifestations of human connection, ambition, and time. Through my paintings, I explore this intersection of personal memory, structural geometry, and historical narrative. By capturing the scale, grit, and enduring presence of these spans, I invite viewers to stand beneath them with me—to feel the weight of the concrete and steel, and to contemplate the worlds they connect and divide.

Sliding Across the Manhattan Bridge: This painting captures the frantic, adrenaline-fueled energy of crossing the Manhattan Bridge in the 1980s and 90s. The dense web of geometric lines and fractured industrial tones mirrors the experience of running the gauntlet along the forbidden roadway—dodging traffic, navigating the slick metal-grated surface, and darting through the openings of the metal fence onto the active train tracks. It embodies a reckless intimacy with the city's infrastructure, where the boundary between control and chaos was as thin as a steel barrier. The composition holds the memory of the bridge’s massive towers flashing violently above, viewed as your head is drunkenly lolling against the backseat headrest while the car slides uncontrollably across the frozen rhythm of the metal grate road surface.

VerraNzano: In Brooklyn our accents would always drop consonants and syllables and run words together in one breath - except for some reason we added an N to Verrazano. It’s the only instance I recall. The challenge of painting about the unique experience of racing across this bridge, buried inside the lower roadway’s tunnel-like drive, across the long span of the Narrows, that particular blue-green color of the steel merging with speed into the night sky. In this painting I first learned how to paint objects behind me, behind the viewer, in time and space.

Swimming Beneath Cochecton Bridge #3: When I lived in Cochecton, NY near the Delaware River, on hot Summer days I’d swim beneath the Bridge connecting New York to Pennsylvania - Cochecton to Damascus. Breaking the water my wet eyes would see the structure of the bridge merge with my immediate memory of it. I noticed a split second where my memory of the structure overlapped the seeing of it again. How much of what we see, or what we think we see, is actual sight or memory? Like in VerraNzano, this painting required me to paint the structure before my sight and simultaneously above and behind me. The green painted steel structure itself goes from actual to ‘expected’, from seen piecemeal to remembered. Are we building the bridge as we see it or is this just the mechanical nature of our sight?

Drunk Driving Beneath the El: This painting anchors itself in sensory paradoxes. I draw inspiration from the staccato, fragmented environment of driving beneath Brooklyn's elevated train lines, like the McDonald Avenue El. The flashing, faceted imagery of the city passing by at speed creates an overwhelming density, a visual chaos that memory must continually piece together. My work maps the threshold between sight, memory, and the velocity of modern life. Rooted in the landscapes of New York, my paintings investigate the psychological topography of how we inhabit our surroundings. I am deeply fascinated by the moments where physical architecture dissolves into human perception, forcing the mind to reconstruct the world while it is being experienced.

D.U.M.B.O. (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass): There could be no greater difference between Disney’s “Dumbo” baby elephant character flying with floppy ears and Brooklyn’s neighborhood by the East River with his name in acronym. This old warehouse area by my time had degenerated into a crack neighborhood ridden with crime and homelessness, but it was also ripe with degenerate scenery. A completely unrenovated block of buildings falling into the cobblestone streets, dark in shadow even in daylight, and yet the bridges above vaunting across the river to Manhattan offered some hope of escape. Rare blinding jolts of light casting frozen shadows on broken surfaces and movement in the darkness. I was sorry when it gentrified.

A video of me speaking about my painting “Swimming Beneath Cochecton Bridge” at my solo exhibition at the Delaware Valley Arts Association in Narrowsburg, NY, 2021.