A 'Star Hill' Buildings' Side

A bright morning on the streets of Charlottesville one will find many people walking on its main avenues' sidewalks to downtown. West Main street connects the downtown city (where most of the private businesses and government offices are located) and the rest of the city. But many people choose to live in other sections of the city like the black area of 'Page Street Corridor' or the Fifeville area or JPA (Jefferson Park Ave) or in the student apartment area of 14th St. Wherever it is west of the downtown has two main streets that reach the downtown area. The choice many make is to 'bus it' or 'walk it' via W. Main Street and/or Preston Ave. If one chooses W. Main Street it is lined by many small businesses and bars/ restaurants where this city gets its charm from, or so it seems to me. I have been spending my time during the last couple of years photographing many of its buildings in order to make an effort to paint them. It seemed to me that gentrification of them was about to begin when I began this task, now it is well underway in 2018. Many new monoliths are going up. Monoliths without much character to them, they merely are functional and I am sure cost efficient. It is form without any extras like curved lines or areas that adorn the facade. It just isn't as visually interesting as what these buildings are replacing, so I began the effort of painting canvases of those buildings that were being replaced or are now being overshadowed with block long bigbox hotels/ student apartments, etc. They are having a huge impact on the look of this city. I think at this time there are five to six new city-blook sized hotel/residental buildings that have just been built or are to be built soon. This is a painting of a spot near 'Star Hill' where a street comes out onto W. Main St from passing under the RXR tracks just behind these buildings. I enjoyed the challenge of painting the surface where a wall mural had been put up back around 1980. The city manager had a contest for artist of designs that could be used. One was selected from this building (one that I liked too) but over time the weather has diminished it into what I find to be a very interesting sidewall of a typical store on West Main St. It took some pondering of how to go about getting the effect of what that building looks like now down on canvas. Some people see buildings as a dull, boring subject to paint, however I beg to differ, this was quite a challenge and it took some technical know-how to come up with this canvas. I hope it was worth the effort to you the viewer and that you can enjoy it for what it is.