~5.25"x7". watercolor. white gouache.

Made for my friend thomasblue, who is a local boy far away from home. These may get a little fanciful, but they are more Wish-You-Were-Here postcards than literal documentary.

The Prudential Building is one of the primary landmarks of Boston. You can see it from miles away, like Mt. Fuji, or the Eiffel Tower - even as far as Waltham, (if above the trees, say, in the Viking Tower), and further if the day is clear.

As long as you can see it, you can't get lost in the Boston Metro area; aim for it and you'll eventually find the center of the city.

It's fundamentally a solid slab of brute Modernist construction from the mid-60's. I'm told it's an eyesore - or anonymous architecture, at best. Though I personally feel that the design is redeemed by the top observatory floors and the organic mass of antennas that have sprung up over the years on the roof.

Because it is so tall, the evocative radio towers on top are never actually all that distinct - they could imaginatively be anything really. An omnipresent, but inaccessible fantasyland of spidery spires like the Watts Towers. A distant magical forest. A micro-sized futuristic Buck Rogers metropolis, like Emerald City at night, or the City In A Bottle from 1001 Arabian Nights, or simply the Pru having a bad hair day. The rest of the building feels like a pedestal for this stuff and the top few floors. The whole thing could be a spaceship on a custom-built landing pad.

The top design justifies the plainness of rest of the building and gives it character.

The view from the observation floor is amazing, and all the more so during the various hazy states of moody New England weather.

I love painting heroic clouds.

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