SCHEMATICS: The Painted Cities of James Heron

By Meredith Tromble

James Heron extends the long tradition of artists captivated by the appearance and meaning of architectural forms. His work can be related to the twisting spaces of the Renaissance engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the ominous streets of the Surrealist painter Giorgio di Chirico, and the perspectival abstractions of the contemporary painter Al Held. Yet his work is entirely his own, a distinctive blend of construction, abstraction, and reverie. Trained as an architect and practicing as both an architect and a painter, he draws on both disciplines in his expressive images of urban environments. 

The cityscapes he creates are simultaneously desolate, without human figures, and lively, animated by complex rhythms of color and shape. Heron's vision of the built environment emphasizes the undertones – the architectural elements – and the overtones – the relationship between structures – dropping out what is often considered to be the primary theme of urban scenes, the human experience of street level. This gap in the visual structure positions onlookers at a novel point of view and draws their attention to levels of experience that frequently escape notice.

It was a kind of building that had escaped the notice of architectural historians that most inspired Heron when he was a young architect-in-training in the 1970s. Bernard Rudofsky's now-classic volume on vernacular structures, Architecture Without Architects (published in 1964 as an exhibition catalog of the Museum of Modern Art, New York ) is filled with distinctive forms: vaulted cell-houses in the Cycladic Islands, rectangular pit dwellings in China's loess belt, sculptural granaries in Africa, and arcades in Spain. Heron, who like Rudofsky has traveled the world to see architecture from different cultures, credits Architecture Without Architects as a continuing inspiration.

In the book's preface, Rudofsky places particular emphasis on the role of natural or constructed barriers in defining a community's borders. He points out that the word "urbanity" comes from the Latin urbs, meaning "walled town."  In Urb (2003), Heron surrounds a piece of "empty" space at the lower left with densely packed structures. Constricted within their borders, the structures have mushroomed upwards. They fill the horizon to the point that the sky, where it can be glimpsed, is just another piercing in the overwhelming architecture. But, though the structures voraciously gobble up their own space, they don't spill over into the plain. The tension between density and openness drives the painting.

Urb is an example of a kind of composition that Heron calls "freeform," evolved by improvising on an initial passage. He identifies three other types of composition common to his work, which he thinks of as "theme with variations," "the big thing," and "abstract." 

The "theme with variations" approach can be seen in Pitfalls (2003), with its multiple views of stairs between unroofed structures. The gentle color harmonies, based in twilight tones of orange, green, and violet, may entice the viewer into the painting. But the viewer should beware – in this strange world, he or she will have only two possible courses of action: pacing stairs like a hamster on a treadmill or walking on the brink of a precipice. The gestalt of the image is a semi-conscious awareness of the fragility and futility of life – a body's life energy rises and falls over and over, but in the end, the pit awaits.

An undercurrent of menace also adds intrigue to Solitary (2003), an example of "the big thing" composition. But in Solitary, Heron uses the architectural forms to suggest a human psychological state. The central tower, with which a viewer might identify as a "figure," seems to be both isolated and imprisoned by stepped walls. Egress for a smaller being might be possible through one door in the wall at the right, but Heron stifles even that hint of escape, visually camouflaging the "exit" by incorporating it into the overall pattern of windows. The tower, set at angles to the walls, is placed so that it seems to be at odds with them.  Its slim, upright volume even looks like a numeral "1." In contrast, the opposing walls extend indefinitely and their rows of openings suggest a "multitude." The architectural allegory is of the relationship between an individual and an oppressive group.

In the compositions in which Heron emphasizes the abstract forms of architecture, such as Setback (2003), psychological readings give way to physical sensations. He places the viewer at a dizzying height; the sense of observing from the air is intensified by a blue mist trickling into the upper part of the composition.  Looking down from a high building is both exhilarating and terrifying and Setback exploits the thrill to the fullest.

Painting, which freed Heron from the practical demands of building, gave him the means to communicate his deep sensitivity to the expressive possibilities of architecture. He manipulates simple structural forms with the imaginative force of a child playing with Leggos; but the results are not simple. In his paintings, architectural elements achieve the symbolic flexibility of words, combining and recombining in nuanced accounts of philosophy, emotion, and sensation. 

Essay by Meredith Tromble,  2003 for Schematics an exhibition for American Institute of Architects Washington DC