Downtown

Stone has been painting the Downtown skyline view of the World Trade Center from his Tribeca studio window since 1980. The skyline painting practice that was an internal dialogue with his immediate world turned into a dialogue with history on 9/11/01. 

 

The Witness series of watercolors are an elegy drawn from Stone’s experience of that tragic skyline during the attack and its aftermath. After the second tower fell, his studio was flooded by light, and he has been painting the empty skyline ever since. The downtown skyline is charged by what is not there as its buildings serve as a metaphor for its people’s resilience.. This void at Ground Zero has generated a power from the absence as forceful as the Towers did before. The morphing New York City skyline is refilled by a shimmering reminder of what once stood and promise of a future city built better still to come.

The most recent paintings depict the panoramic view from the 71st floor of 3 World Trade Center overlooking the Memorial, Downtown skyline and city beyond. The paintings foster a dialogue about how the external face of a city’s skyline reflects its peoples’ shared inner life.

 

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Visit the artist’s archive to purchase available work from this gallery.