City vision
Artist creates painting that captures feel of three Troy neighborhoods.
Where once sat a pint-sized drive-in bank better suited to suburbia, the corner of Fourth and Congress Streets in downtown Troy is now occupied by a contemporary apartment building of an appropriately urban scale. The Vicina stands five stories tall with 80 units and was completed in the fall by Rosenblum Companies, an Albany-based development and management firm. A few years ago and only a few blocks away,
Rosenblum converted and expanded the ornate former headquarters of the Troy Record into another residential building
called The News.
“Vicina” is Italian for neighbor and to honor the neighborhood and its rich history, the
developers commissioned a new work, an impressive 12.5 feet by 6 feet, from local artist Christopher Murray. His painting is on permanent display in the building’s lobby. It’s a colorful and jagged relief of overlapping images that evoke life as it once was in the Collar City.
“I always held in the back of my mind representing this specific area of Troy in the micro and the macro. Some cool visual movement brings the eye to various nooks and corners of the painting,” says Murray.
The piece consists of three large wooden panels. Onto this blank field Murray glued some 100 blocks of flat wood, each cut to scale in order to recreate the street grid of the center of the city. Also mounted on the panels are countless slivers of balsa wood aligned in curving path
ways to represent the train tracks that once snaked in and around the city. Waves of caulk located below the street map suggest the currents of the Hudson River.
Murray calls this assemblage a “relief sculpture” and it became his canvas for a painting of three storefronts, an Italian grocery, a cobbler and a bakery. The pallet of colors was chosen to represent the three neighborhoods that converge at the site — downtown, Little Italy, and the pottery district.
“Painting, color and collage are in all my works. I’m fascinated by textures,” says Murray. “The hardest aspect here was trying to do representational painting over distressed surfaces. I considered it an opportunity to stretch my wings.”
The idea for a commissioned work came from Jeffrey Mirel, a vice president at Rosenblum who is also a noted arts advocate and founder of the Albany Barn. Murray recalls that they got acquainted more than a decade ago when Mirel attended art openings of the Albany Underground Artists.
“Jeff was looking for something that reflected the history of the location and had an urban, gritty feel. He wanted it to be tactile, like you wanted to touch it, something that had actual dimensions, not just shadows painted on. I thought of how the city streets build up years of history, layers of street life with grunge and rawness,” says Murray.
The prolific artist works in a variety of styles and is especially known for depictions of nature. One series is of vertiginous but imaginary mountains constructed of layered strips of foreign newspapers. There’s also a long run of vibrant blossoms swelling on a giant scale. Among the latter is a depiction of scarlet red orchids against a solid black field, which hangs in the glass enclosed parlor on the first floor of the Vicina.
Despite frequent immersion in the natural world, the concrete and brick cityscape of Troy was an easy leap. Murray, who recently turned 48, was raised in Pleasantdale, a development from the early 1970s located just north of Lansingburgh. He remembers as a kid putting in diligent work on a vegetable garden and spending lots of playtime in the adjacent farmlands. As teens, he and his peers regularly ventured into Lansingburgh where “we thought we were edgy.”
Creativity runs in both sides of Murray’s family. His mom is a painter and ceramic artist and he recalls, “We often had to clear the kitchen table to make way for her projects. My aunt did pen and ink pieces and ever since I was a little kid I thought those are so beautiful, I wish I could do something like that one day.”
When Murray entered undergrad studies at the College of St. Rose, he first majored in graphic design. This was just after the birth of desktop publishing and it wasn’t long before he sought freedom from the machines and switched to studio art. “I didn’t want to sit at a monitor to make art,” he says.
Almost immediately after graduation Murray landed a teaching position with Shenendehowa Central School District where he’s remained for 26 years, becoming the secondlongest tenured faculty member in the district. His wife, Kerry, teaches elementary school and their son Jackson is enrolled at Skidmore College. They live in Niskayuna.
For the Vicina project, the folks at Rosenblum shared with Murray their extensive research on the history of the plot and its environs. Among the documents were photos of ceramic wear that was produced in the pottery district, a strip of Fourth Street that dates to the 18th century. This prompted another childhood memory for Murray — walking with friends along the train tracks of north Troy where they often came across ceramic shards. He recalls, “We’d find pieces of pottery that looked exactly like what I found in the research.”