City Paintings by Fran Beallor - as part of the series on arts by GeoBeats.

My name is Fran Beallor, I am a representational artist in New York City, I live in New York City and I am very lucky to have a nice view out my window. And I have done a number of pieces from that view out my window, this particular piece is a lithograph and a lithograph is a kind of print. So this is an edition of fifty prints and it was done as a very traditional lithograph on a stone, on a square piece of limestone that is specially treated and then the artist comes with a grease crayon and draws the drawing onto the stone. And then the stone is treated with acid and wherever the grease crayon was it resists the acid and allows the print maker to ink the stone and reproduce the drawing many times from the one stone. Now a days, lithographs are often done with millard plastic or zinc plates; but this was done in the traditional style with stone.

I did it as a black and white lithograph, but I also like to hand color some of them with water color and I like that, I find that it personalizes them and it makes each one more unique. Although some people really prefer the graphic black and white. In this drawing, this was the original drawing that I did as a study for the lithograph, I did it forwards and I did it backwards. And I did it both ways; I did it both ways because I wanted to see which one I liked better. I thought if I like better backwards then I would just do the drawings forwards; but in fact, I preferred it forwards. So when I did the lithograph I had to draw that drawing backwards on the stone and then the result was the city scene of the view of a hundredth and first street in New York City.

I also wanted to show one other piece, which is an oil painting, and it is done out of the same window but from a slightly different angle, different buildings, and you get a really typical sense here of New York City brown stones, of the water towers that you see everywhere in the tops of buildings and I love this interesting cone shape roof on the center building. And I love the beautiful colors of the different kinds of brick against the blue of the sky.