Love Affair, Ch. 2: Are You Looking at Me?

Night in the city is not always a party. Sometimes it is quiet and even lonely. I look out of the window in my Chelsea apartment and the surrounding buildings are looking back at me with their window eyes. The lights are on and lives of other people, private and unknown, are illuminated in the frames of their windows. The only separation between our worlds are the slots of the Venetian blinds.

Shaded Night, 60”x30'“

This was the inspiration for the tapestry “Shaded Night,” a 60”x30” piece I completed in 1985. The repetition of horizontal lines breaks up the view and yet the eye compensates for the distraction and completes the image.

Certainly, I was not the only one taken by the night views. Remember Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window?

This tapestry sold rather quickly and I had to make another one.

The Eyes of the Night, 60”x30”

“The Eyes of Night”, created in the same size but in a different pallet, was also sold and then came a commission — my first one!

Shaded Green, 60”x30”

It would go to a private home, on the wall next to the client’s window with Venetian blinds.

I still think back to that time in my life and remember the sounds in the night that came from living in such proximity to the lives of fellow New Yorkers….