Still Open
1994
Douglas Safranek (b. 1956)
Egg tempera on panel, 4 5/8 X 4
Museum purchase, 95.6

 

This evening view of Greenpoint, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, was recorded from a high window in the building where the artist resides. Its focal point is the blazing facade of an all-night mini-market. The scene is further illuminated by a row of street lamps, random interior lights in otherwise darkened apartment houses, and the faraway massed skyscrapers of Manhattan, all rendered with delicate precision. This array of lights reinforces the notion of a city that never sleeps.

Douglas Safranek, who found New York City's density and pervasive stimulation overwhelming when he arrived from the Midwest in 1984, turned to the meditative process of egg tempera, which allows him to achieve a deliberative stillness and quality of intimacy even in his most active compositions. For this carefully fabricated piece, he removed all of New York's frenetic and accidental elements. From the safe, elevated vantage point of a tall building, the viewer's gaze is focused on the cityscape of the streets. The quietude and timelessness of Still Open result in part from this imposition of controlled panoramic perspective on the general disorder found in street scenes.

Safranek graduated from Boston College and in 1984 received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied with James Wattras and John Wilde. Like many emerging urban-scene painters, he has been forced by the economics of New York's real estate market to locate in the city's "borderline" areas. In these settings, Safranek's work proves, poetic subject matter can be found or made even from the seemingly mundane.¹ Typically, Safranek's titles, such as Walking the Dog, Domino Sugar, and Over Brooklyn, exemplify this lyrical quality. In addition to the Museum of the City of New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New-York Historical Society also count his work among their collections.

Notes:

  1  The 1990s boom market of Manhattan real estate has produced several Brooklyn art colonies, including Greenpoint (where Safranek lives), DUMBO (District Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and Williamsburg.