City Wheels

City Wheels - R Williamson, acrylic on canvas; 48” x 42”, 5/23

This piece recently sold off of my Saatchi online gallery site. Created solely as a color sample for a large interior mural that greatly expanded on the theme depicted here, of people-powered urban transport. For all the years that I’ve done mural type commissions, for various hospitality type projects, mostly I did the color samples on pieces of foam core. That material made them light, easy to transport, easy to slice off a section for a designer to match to or use on a color board. But the material wasn’t archival; mostly the panels would get warped and the edges would be easily dinged, and corners would become dog-eared. So in the last ten years I started to occasionally do them on a large canvas, just to see if I could make a real painting as I worked out some of the designs. And in a few cases it worked.

I now advise younger muralists to do the same as they work out their wall designs and then sell the smaller versions once they’ve served their purpose.

City Wheels (archival wrapping, part 1, glassine layer); R Williamson 5/25