Manhattan Skyline

Little did I know until too late to write this post that yesterday (May 24th) was the anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. I may have missed the boat, but it put me in mind that I had yet to do a post here on the blog featuring one of my favorite pieces of photo art from the past year! Not only am I very happy with how this picture turned out, I have gotten a lot of nice feedback in response to it!

The photo at the basis of this digital art was taken on my so far only visit to New York City back in 2009. One evening there friends and I made our way over to Brooklyn to see the Manhattan skyline at dusk, which was quite an incredible view! I actually have a very similar photo to this one of the Brooklyn Bridge au natural that has been featured here before. If you check out that link, you’ll see it’s almost dead on the same picture as it was taken at the same time from the same spot. I honestly don’t remember now why I used the next picture in my library for this piece of art, but I did.

To date, I have never saved the stack of  photoshop layers I use in my photo art, but there are a variety of textures added to this, most prominently the stars and the moon courtesy of our friends at NASA. I have found that dusk skies are particularly suited to over-laying with stars. That makes sense of course as its when we see the brightest stars first appear at night, but in reality the brilliant lights of Manhattan would obscure those very stars. That’s the great thing about art, not being held back by reality! When I was creating the image in this print, it very much reminded me of the somewhat exaggerated feel of a large theatrical backdrop. I could totally see a play about the Big Apple being acted out on a stage in front of this, can’t you? That was very much the feel of a hyper-reality that I was going for when I did this.

The interesting thing is since then I’ve had more than a few people suggest to me that this reminds them of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It’s interesting because I did in fact go see that famous painting at MOMA while I was in NYC. And it was just as beautiful in person as I expected:

So, naturally, I’m flattered with the comparison! Who knows maybe I was channeling my inner Van Gogh (the one we all have that wants to create). And I guess I see it in some of the colors and maybe a general vibe, but of course the subjects are worlds apart, Manhattan versus Saint-Rémy. I think ultimately my ears are safe but it’s still a great compliment to have anything I’ve done compared to one of humanity’s great artists.

It’s interesting how many paths we end on that we never saw. I never imagined coming to love travel so much. I never imagined loving photography and now I’ve added yet another outlet doing my photo-art or digital-art creations. I think I can particularly credit some of this last category to my year long art project. It wasn’t always easy but I really think I’ve benefited from having required myself to go through this “chore” each day. Today was day 283 of my 365 project – in the home stretch!

Chime in with your thoughts about this piece, please! Do you see the comparison? Not so much?