Pamela Lawton’s Liquid City

From "The Statement," a monthly e-zine for the professional designer:

Great art shows us beauty that is often overlooked. It teaches us to see our everyday world with new eyes. Pamela Lawton has done just that, showing us a view of the city we may not have noticed; the endless reflections of one glass building onto another. “Liquid City”, a series of paintings that captures this phenomenon, is fluid, undulating, colorful and alive. The work is both emotional and musical, as the colors seem to waver with emotion. “Most tourists experience the city from the street level. They're interested in street events," says Lawton. "Instead, I'm looking high up at a beautiful skyscraper that's kind of timeless because it's capturing light, it's capturing rhythms and nature.”


In the late 1990s the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council had a program that allowed artists to use the unoccupied 10% of the World Trade Center as studio space. It was here that Lawton occupied different studios that looked out onto the adjacent buildings. She noticed that the reflections of the other towers in their glass facades appeared to move and change throughout the day. Lawton explains, "I noticed the architecture, kind of '70s architecture, tends to have distorted glass. I was also experiencing the kind of vertical vertigo that you get when you're in the World Trade Center You know, that kind of 'woosh' of the elevator and the swaying of the building. So I wanted to include that in my work as well."

So many artists and poets have spoken to the play of light and reflection on the surface of water that it seems remarkable that no one until Lawton had paid homage to this occurrence in glass. After all, the glass curtain wall is one of the most defining elements of the modern urban landscape. Liquid City is not only intriguing to look at, it is aptly named, as glass is a cooled liquid. Sand and lime are heated until they are molten, and when this fiery liquid cools it forms into glass. The Ancient Egyptian word for glass was iner en wedeh, which translates as “stone of the kind that flows.” On a molecular level, glass is amorphous like a liquid, and not crystalline like other solid materials.

Liquid City makes us love the concrete jungle in a whole new way.

You can view Pamela's work at http://www.artrentandlease.com/

Promoting Art and the Cabarrus Arts Council

Art Rent and Lease is excited to announce their support of the Cabarrus Arts Council and participating artists for our art rental, sales and art leasing program for corporate, healthcare and hospitality clients.  A portion of all proceeds related to Cabarrus Arts Council artists rentals, sales and leases will be donated to the Cabarrus Arts Council to support their mission of "energizing our community through arts excellence."

The Cabarrus Arts Council was founded in 1980 in response to the North Carolina Arts Council's plan to establish a local arts council in every county. In 1982 the Cabarrus County Board of Commissioners selected the arts council to serve as its Designated County Partner, receiving and distributing Grassroots funding from the state and the state arts council.


Today the arts council programs and operates the Davis Theatre and the Arts Council Galleries, conducts one of North Carolina's largest art-in-education programs for both the Cabarrus County and Kannapolis City school systems, supports arts organizations and artists through grants and workshops, and serves as a catalyst and consultant for public and corporate art.

By supporting the Cabarrus Arts Council and their artists, Art Rent and Lease will help to promote local artists to our clients while providing a rental or leasing alternative to help meet budgetary restrictions clients may have in these tough economic times.