The Urban Landscape Series

RE: “URBAN LANDSCAPE”, an on going series of acrylic paintings.

Jack Cassady’s “ The Urban Landscape Series”, is about color, texture, time, and the urban experience.

The concept for the series originated in 1993. The artist was very interested in the combination of abstraction and representation, which he has played with in a number of other series. With the use of texture the artist creates an abstract background on which he then paints an urban landscape, the result is a realistic image on top of an abstraction, creating a paradox, a very subtle paradox.
People always ask the artist why he has the texture on the paintings, his answer is: when I was a kid growing up in a small town in Alberta, there was not an art gallery in the town and I don’t think the Edmonton Art Gallery existed then either, and if it did it had a tiny collection, and Edmonton was a ways away. The only art to be seen outside his home were reproductions in Woolworth’s, now these reproductions were made to look like they were real by printing them on a textured card to look like brush strokes etc. This is part of the concept, reverting to ones’ past, drawing from past experience, merging it with the present, the visual images come from the artist’s  journey through streets. The idea for this series came to the artist as he crossed the walking bridge over the river Seine, from the Left Bank to the Louvre, in the spring of 1992, in Paris, France.

The images in the series range from street scenes, to parks, to markets and have been exhibited in Toronto.