Soft high-rise residence with attached springs
Terry Baker
printed on Giclée Epson Semi-Gloss
All abstract fine-art prints have a starting point, an original source from which the final image is created. The unlikely provenance of this colourful print is a conventional photograph, taken on a Nikon D700 in 2009, of Marina City Towers, State Street, Chicago, designed by architect Bertrand Goldberg. The whole complex was constructed between 1963-68 and the two 65 storey towers (residential and parking) were designated a Chicago Landmark in 2016. They figure in almost any book on Chicago architecture. Here, all similarity ends and abstraction takes over. The original photo was heavily manipulated in both Lightroom and Photoshop using a plethora of filters and tools to distort, re-size, re-colour, and posterise the image. Certain structures in the picture resemble tightly wound springs, hence the title, and the whole has a distinctly surrealist feeling.