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I’ve always been fascinated by enormously tall buildings. There’s just something about man’s ability and competitive drive to build taller and taller structures, each one more sensational than the last, that has always captured my imagination.
Growing up in a small town, I was eager to see the impressive skylines of some “real” cities, and by the late 70’s wound up in Minnesota attending art college (Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and the School of the Associated Arts in St. Paul) where I was greatly inspired by the I.D.S. Building which towered magnificently above the rest of the Minneapolis skyline.
I visited friends in N.Y.C. and was spellbound by standing between the Twin Trade Centers and looking straight up at the mammoth structures stretching so incredibly high over head. It seemed almost inconceivable that such puny little creatures as ourselves could erect such gargantuan structures.
As an illustrator, I discovered during these college years that I could successfully combine my perspective skills with my creative visions. Starting with numerous paintings and illustrations of imaginary city skylines (always in profile) each piece became more and more involved.
I suddenly realized the impact of the “overhead” view late in 1980 after playing around with a few thumbnail ideas. After two moderately successful illustrations awakened me to more exciting challenges, I decided to put it all together in a large illustration called “Acro City” which I completed in 1982. (100 limited edition reproductions - Sold out)
It is a fictional painting depicting a great bristling city somewhere near Portland Oregon with an incredibly tall building “in your face”, dwarfing the rest of the structures around it - just as the I.D.S. building had done in the late 70’s.
The difference is, the monster building in Acro City - the International Science & Research Center (I.S.R.) -
is 240 storeys tall!
The 100 limited edition reproductions made of Acro City met with such positive response that in 1984 I decided to follow it up with another, even more elaborate painting - in color - and at twice the size (It took up an entire illustration board). It was such an undertaking that I found I could only work on it in spurts, when the creative bug hit me, or when an idea for a cool building design dawned on me. Thus, the painting ended up taking many years to complete.
I decided I wanted to create a story around it, and even show “Acro City” in the background from a different angle. Again, a monster building would tower over the rest of the city and fill the foreground. I wanted the building to look believable, but just barely - stretching the limits of ones imagination. I think there comes a point where a structure can appear so tall that it becomes indiscernible from one twice again as large, so there seems to be a “sweet spot” where, any larger, and it loses it’s credibility.
It was my goal to have the 340-storey Stebbing Quadraplex in the foreground of the Megalite Project achieve that “sweet spot”. After all, 340 storeys is more than 3 times the height of anything in existence today.People often ask: was I inspired by “Blade Runner”? My answer is no. I was impressed with it, but my conceptualization came much earlier, and the designs are all my own. What about M.C. Escher?
Again, although my work has been compared to his (what a compliment!) I would have to say this is purely coincidental as I only knew of his birds-into-fish morph type drawings until receiving a book about him one Christmas in the early eighties.I am a bit of a recluse that way - I didn’t study other artist’s work as much as I probably should have, even though I was in college. I just liked to do my own thing. To be honest, I don’t know where my gift of rendering perspective came from. Seems as if it was always just there. I love detail. I love linear, realistic type drawing, and feel very fortunate to be able to conceptualize and render shapes at will. It is a gift I will never take for granted.
