Bryant Park - The Reading Room Canvas Print

The life-size image of the copper baron and philanthropist William E. Dodge gazes down upon the "Reading Room" area (note the open bookshelves at the right rear) on the West 42nd Street side of Bryant Park. This institution has its roots in the 1930s, when the New York Public Library decided to create a welcoming outdoor facility to help counter the effects of the Great Depression. This is one of five canvases from August 2014, commissioned by the Bryant Park Corporation as part of their Painter-in-Residence program. All were started on-site and completed in the studio.

Peter Salwen's light-filled urban landscapes are in collections across the U.S., Europe and South America. Salwen's paintings, he says "try to express the deep pleasure to be found in something as simple as sunlight on a wall or the ordinary traffic of people and machinery at city street corner. At heart they are simply thank-you notes to Nature for providing such an endless array of visual joys, most especially in New York City, which is of course Nature's noblest creation. "The city streets offer up an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of shapes, colors and impressions to the interested eye. Most of my paintings are an attempt to capture the sensations of one particular moment and somehow wrestle them onto the canvas where, with luck,...