Pairs with:

Statement from the Artist:

Both these paintings look up at the same structure — the Manhattan Bridge — nearly twenty years and a few blocks apart, and the difference says something about how I've come to see this city.

In Manhattan Bridge with Gray Skies (2007), the bridge is front and center. Its blues, reds, and yellows are picked out by late sun against a flat gray sky, almost theatrical — a lone figure fishing below gives scale but little else. The bridge stands apart, an object to be studied and admired on its own terms.

Quiet Morning, Chinatown (2026) approaches the same massive structure from underneath, along Forsyth Street, but the bridge has become part of something larger. Early light cuts long diagonal shadows across the pavement, catching shuttered storefronts layered with graffiti, while two figures in the distance — one walking a dog — move through the scene. The bridge's geometry still dominates overhead, but it's no longer isolated; it's the roof over a neighborhood's morning.

The palette has shifted too, from the saturated, spotlit color of the earlier painting to the muted browns, grays, and faded reds of the street. What once felt like a dramatic encounter with an iconic structure now feels like an ordinary moment in a place that happens to have one running through it.

I think this reflects something true about twenty years of painting New York: less interested in monuments for their own sake, more interested in the life going on in their shadow. The bridge hasn't changed. How I look at it has.