New Harlem

Norman Lewis

Born and raised in Harlem, Norman Lewis began his art career by painting in the style of social realism and depicted themes that his predominantly African American community dealt with on a daily basis, such as racial prejudice, evictions, and police brutality. However by the middle of his artistic career, Lewis felt that his social realism paintings could not accurately express the depth of the social conflict he sought to depict, and began to paint in an abstract expressionist style.

Using expressionism as a mode to translate social themes into abstract ideas and feelings, Lewis painted urban life in bright swatches of color and textured lines. Though his work evolved form representational images to abstract paintings, these black swatches evoked visceral emotion and felt more human than his paintings of people ever could. 

Harlem Courtyard

In Lewis’s “Harlem Courtyard”, a large canvas is covered in earthy brown and grey tones so that very little is left white. The tallness of the canvas, as well as the pointed grey swatches together imply an urban landscape characterized by hazy light and tall, almost oppressive buildings. Among these city-like swatches of grey stand varied strokes of brown and tan tones, each different from the last. Marked by bold black lines, these earthy tones imply busy movement. The gestural feeling of the marks, along with the varied earth tones, suggests humans in movement and evokes a feeling of claustrophobic uneasiness among these human elements juxtaposed with this drab abstracted cityscape.

Response

I chose this painting in particular because the human feeling of it was immediate when I first saw it; despite the abstract nature of it, something felt very compellingly human about it. It was only after reading about Norman Lewis that I learned what the painting was really about, and I was intrigued to see that the sense of human connection it evoked in me was the artist’s intent.

Product

I created this image on Photoshop using my laptop. To begin, I had the original image side-by-side with the one I was creating, and went back and forth between the two as I randomly sampled color swatches from the original and drew in strokes of varying color and opacity on mine. While I tried to keep the feeling of the vertical brush strokes, the process was pretty random and resulted in random swatches of color while keeping the gist of the grey sides of the buildings and the dark movement-filled lines for the people. At the end, I used the smudge tool to disrupt the clean computer-generated lines.

Reflection

While the project prompt sounded pretty straight-forward, I found the process of trying to create randomness on a computer extremely difficult. Tools like the color sampler on Photoshop helped me translate aspects of the original into my product, but the gestural strokes of the brush in Norman Lewis's original paintings were lost in this digital form. Though there is still a good deal of movement in the picture I created, the human aspect that initially drew me into "Harlem Courtyard" was also difficult to convey in a digital form. 

If I were to do this again differently, I would have used a tablet so that the strokes could be a little more gestural and human.