Alienation
Apr 17th, 2008 by kali
I’d never lived in a big city before moving to Berlin, and one of the things that really awed me was the gargantuan size of the public buildings here. They’re built on a scale that is meant to make people feel small and inconsequential beside them. I’d only experienced this sense of radically diminished importance in relation to natural landscapes — the canyons and deserts of the southwestern United States, or the heights of the Rocky Mountains.
But unlike the immensity of natural wonders, a gargantuan human landscape has an alienating effect on me. I feel not only unimportant, but impotent; reduced to ineffectual protest in the face of inexorable institutions. It’s the feeling of being simultaneously dwarfed and disaffected that I tried to capture in this digital painting, loosely based on a public domain image captured by a Farm Security Administration photographer in the 1930s. Most of the work was done in Painter, with multiple layers and custom brushes. The image was then printed, hand painted with acrylics, and scanned again.
