West Side Canvas: First Light Skims the Rooftop of the Ansonia on the UWS

First Light
By Robert Beck

The Ansonia stands out in the crowd. There are famous buildings, popular buildings, and unusual buildings on the UWS, but nothing beats the Ansonia for timeless style. Broadway has a slight kink at 72nd, so if you are coming up from Lincoln Center, the Ansonia is directly in front of you, between 73rd and 74th. You notice it from quite a distance because it is unlike anything else in sight — very French Beaux-arts and most elegant.

You don’t get a lot of elegance along Broadway. Judging by what I see, nobody cares much about what the outside of a building looks like anymore. At least not the people paying for them. There is an enormous, out-of-place, loophole-designed monstrosity rising to blot out all future sunsets behind my own building. This is not just blocking the sky for other apartment dwellers but also the park vegetation. It‘s that big. The new building looks like they all do nowadays: like somebody got a deal on windows and gamed the system. A façade only an architect could love.

If I lived in the Ansonia, I’d feel uplifted from the moment it came into view. I’m not sure the people south of the park who have to grab something to hold on to as their pencil-thin status symbols sway in the stratosphere have the same regard for their homes in the clouds.

I was fortunate to be on the penthouse terrace of a nearby building when I turned and saw the front of the Ansonia in the distance beyond the end of the deck. It appeared as a great aunt in her turn-of-the-century lace and pearls, casting a humorless look around the corner to be sure I was behaving properly.

That’s the thing. The new architecture presents itself as robotic, self-absorbed, and uninterested in anything or anybody nearby, but the older stuff, with classic proportions and allegorical fenestration, has a heart. It’s a place that puts its arm around you when you come home and brushes the worry off your shoulders. Or asks where you’ve been.

So how to paint it? Lots of options. I liked the view from that other building. It made me feel like I was in privileged company. But there are other issues to consider, such as what season of the year, type of weather, and time of day, would give the right feel to the image.

Being up in the canopy of the UWS is very different from the limited views you get down on the street. You feel the expanse. You don’t have to look up to escape; you can look out. That lateral casting made me think of how the light must skim the rooftops at dawn and catch the Ansonia’s green trim on a clear and crisp morning. I could imagine that, and this painting was born.

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First Light is the signature image for Robert Beck’s solo exhibition, Here And Now, at Morpeth Contemporary in Hopewell, NJ, opening September 14. www.morpethcontemporary.com. This essay is adapted from an article in ICON Magazine.

See more of Robert Beck’s work and visit his UWS studio at www.robertbeck.net. Let him know if you have a connection to an archetypical UWS place or event that would make a good West Side Canvas subject. Thank you!

Note: Before Robert Beck started West Side Canvas, his essays and paintings were featured in Weekend Column. Read Robert Beck’s earlier columns here and here.

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