A few weeks ago I completed this watercolor and ink work titled “240 Houses.” It was inspired by two views of a neighborhood I am very fond of, The Potato Rows or Kartoffelrækkerne in Copenhagen.
In the recent years a very fantastic aerial photographer started taking photos of this neighborhood and posting them online. His name is Nicolas Cosedis and I highly recommend checking out his work, he is truly a frontiersman and takes striking images you’ve likely already seen all over. I am a BIG fan and have been since he started posting to one of my Facebook groups about Copenhagen life. He has an incredible eye for landscape and takes just the most stunning photos.
Since his photos began circulating, dozens of other photographers have begun to copy his images with either drones or even getting in planes themselves. If you google search “The Potato Rows” you’ll see hundreds of versions of this incredible photograph.
But you can also see this view, kind of, from the tall apartment building at the far end of Øster Farimagsgade, a building a friend/client of mine lived in and because most of the foreigners I knew in Copenhagen lived on the top floor… I had pretty excellent access to the view below. I suspect that this view was also accessible to Cosedis and as it is visually very striking, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was the original inspiration for the photo.
I did use Cosedis’ famous photo as a partial reference for the shape of the houses and the overall idea for the layout. I wanted the composition to read a little more flat/Wes Anderson so I repeated the measurements for each of the houses all the way through the painting instead of providing a visual recession. I was definitely thinking pattern seeking and textile over realism.
The windows are painted with a watercolor gold leaf to give them the feeling that the sun is coming up. One of my favorite things to experience in Denmark was the sunrise in summer and to watch the heavy light paint everything these jewelbox tones of oranges and purples.
I also shortened the houses and removed the views of the projecting windows on the reverse sides to give them a feeling of tightness and community. I thought of each house more like an individual person rather than a home and tried to infuse that idea into each home as I worked on it.
In the very center of the work you’ll find one house out of place. The colors I used for this house are not exactly in the same palate and with very little of the gold. But still even in its darkness, the house doesn’t stand out from the sea of houses as a whole. It still is tightly woven in the community, an action that can be seen by some as supportive and inclusive… but also hiding the issues at hand by others.
240 Houses is a watercolor and ink painting on a 22” x 30” piece of cold pressed watercolor paper and will be available for view on June 23rd at the Colville Art Walk in Colville, WA.