Wednesday, July 16, 2014

City of Amber detail


This is an excerpt from CITY OF AMBER, the last of the 4 great hyper-detailed 
“city” pictures I did in the ‘90s. AMBER was commissioned by Elektra and Michael Hammond, who already owned many of my works. The picture was based on the swashbuckling fantasy series by Roger Zelazny, THE CHRONICLES OF AMBER. The vertical format panorama shows a wildly detailed Italian-Renaissance style city sited on a mountaintop, with numerous borrowings from European buildings of that era. The royal palace is topmost, with its magical reflections in the sky. A selection of characters from the Zelazny books appears in various places in the foreground.Two of the Hammonds’ prize Maine Coons are also depicted in the picture, though not in this view.

This painting took five painstaking months. Some of it was painted under a magnifying glass with miniature brushes. No computer was used anywhere in the project. 

The whole painting of CITY OF AMBER is acrylic on gessoed hardboard (Masonite), 24" x 36", June-November 1999. Click on the image for a larger view.

3 comments:

Tristan Alexander said...

And it is one of your many fantastically amazing detailed pictures! A masterpiece!

Mo said...

This takes my breath away! A beautiful piece!

Robby Baby Dark Poet of Amour said...

I enjoy this greatly. I like how you took time to put in so much detail. I love fishing out detail in pieces. I have this uploaded on my phone. I look forward to zooming in on different segments to see the detail :) What I like most about this piece is that it is detailed without being to "cluttered" or "busy" :)