2023 | Cold Wax and Mixed Media on Canvas | Original Framed Painting
A city is never just a collection of buildings. It is a collection of lives, histories, fragments, and stories held together by something far more complicated than architecture.
In Indigo, contemporary artist Alissa Van Atta transforms an original photograph of New York City into a richly textured mixed-media painting that explores the relationship between urban environments, memory, imperfection, and reconstruction.
The painting began with a photograph taken from the Indigo Hotel in New York City. Captivated by the seemingly endless arrangement of windows and architectural details, Van Atta used the image as the foundation for an exploration of the city's layered visual history.
Through image transfer, cold wax, and mixed-media techniques, recognizable building facades dissolve into an atmospheric composition of indigo, icy blue, smoky gray, white, and weathered rust. Windows emerge and disappear beneath translucent passages of pigment, scraped surfaces, and accumulated layers.
The city becomes simultaneously familiar and elusive, its architecture suspended somewhere between photographic reality and abstract recollection.
Rather than preserving the transferred image intact, Van Atta deliberately tore sections of the canvas, introducing physical disruption into the composition. Clasps, safety pins, and twine were incorporated to hold the fragmented material together, transforming damage and repair into essential elements of the artwork.
These interventions are not merely decorative. They introduce a compelling relationship between destruction and preservation, exposing the vulnerability beneath the apparent permanence of the urban landscape.
The torn canvas echoes the experience of a city continually altered by time, development, displacement, and renewal. Buildings change, neighborhoods transform, and familiar places disappear, yet traces of what existed before remain embedded within the landscape.
The visible fastenings suggest the effort required to hold those fragments together. Rather than concealing the disruptions, the painting allows them to remain part of its identity.
The resulting surface becomes a physical record of transformation.
The title Indigo evokes both the atmospheric blue tones of the composition and the location from which its original photographic inspiration emerged. Its cool palette lends the painting a contemplative quality, while warm passages of rust and ochre introduce a sense of history, friction, and accumulated experience.
The repeated windows create their own quiet narrative. Each suggests the possibility of an unseen interior, an individual perspective, or a life unfolding beyond the viewer's reach.
What begins as an architectural image becomes a meditation on the countless human experiences contained within a city.
Part of Van Atta's Her City collection, Indigo reflects her fascination with urban environments as places of both personal memory and collective transformation. The combination of photographic imagery, abstraction, and physical reconstruction challenges the distinction between representing a place and capturing its emotional presence.
Complex, atmospheric, and deeply tactile, Indigo rewards close observation, revealing new relationships between image, texture, and material with each encounter.
A city is never truly whole. Its beauty exists in the countless pieces that remain, disappear, and somehow find their way back together.
Artwork Details
Artist: Alissa Van Atta
Title: Indigo
Year: 2023
Medium: Cold Wax and Mixed Media on Canvas
Canvas Dimensions: 36 H × 36 W × 1.5 D inches
Framed Dimensions: 37.75 H × 37.75 W × 1.5 D inches
Weight: Approximately 11 lb, excluding protective shipping materials
Original: One-of-a-kind painting
Presentation: Framed
Signed: Yes
Collection: Her City
Price: $6,000
Status: Available
Current Location: Resurrection AVL, Asheville, North Carolina
This original artwork is available for purchase by inquiry. Please contact the artist to confirm availability and arrange insured fine-art shipping or collection.
2023 | Cold Wax and Mixed Media on Canvas | Original Framed Painting
A city is never just a collection of buildings. It is a collection of lives, histories, fragments, and stories held together by something far more complicated than architecture.
In Indigo, contemporary artist Alissa Van Atta transforms an original photograph of New York City into a richly textured mixed-media painting that explores the relationship between urban environments, memory, imperfection, and reconstruction.
The painting began with a photograph taken from the Indigo Hotel in New York City. Captivated by the seemingly endless arrangement of windows and architectural details, Van Atta used the image as the foundation for an exploration of the city's layered visual history.
Through image transfer, cold wax, and mixed-media techniques, recognizable building facades dissolve into an atmospheric composition of indigo, icy blue, smoky gray, white, and weathered rust. Windows emerge and disappear beneath translucent passages of pigment, scraped surfaces, and accumulated layers.
The city becomes simultaneously familiar and elusive, its architecture suspended somewhere between photographic reality and abstract recollection.
Rather than preserving the transferred image intact, Van Atta deliberately tore sections of the canvas, introducing physical disruption into the composition. Clasps, safety pins, and twine were incorporated to hold the fragmented material together, transforming damage and repair into essential elements of the artwork.
These interventions are not merely decorative. They introduce a compelling relationship between destruction and preservation, exposing the vulnerability beneath the apparent permanence of the urban landscape.
The torn canvas echoes the experience of a city continually altered by time, development, displacement, and renewal. Buildings change, neighborhoods transform, and familiar places disappear, yet traces of what existed before remain embedded within the landscape.
The visible fastenings suggest the effort required to hold those fragments together. Rather than concealing the disruptions, the painting allows them to remain part of its identity.
The resulting surface becomes a physical record of transformation.
The title Indigo evokes both the atmospheric blue tones of the composition and the location from which its original photographic inspiration emerged. Its cool palette lends the painting a contemplative quality, while warm passages of rust and ochre introduce a sense of history, friction, and accumulated experience.
The repeated windows create their own quiet narrative. Each suggests the possibility of an unseen interior, an individual perspective, or a life unfolding beyond the viewer's reach.
What begins as an architectural image becomes a meditation on the countless human experiences contained within a city.
Part of Van Atta's Her City collection, Indigo reflects her fascination with urban environments as places of both personal memory and collective transformation. The combination of photographic imagery, abstraction, and physical reconstruction challenges the distinction between representing a place and capturing its emotional presence.
Complex, atmospheric, and deeply tactile, Indigo rewards close observation, revealing new relationships between image, texture, and material with each encounter.
A city is never truly whole. Its beauty exists in the countless pieces that remain, disappear, and somehow find their way back together.
Artwork Details
Artist: Alissa Van Atta
Title: Indigo
Year: 2023
Medium: Cold Wax and Mixed Media on Canvas
Canvas Dimensions: 36 H × 36 W × 1.5 D inches
Framed Dimensions: 37.75 H × 37.75 W × 1.5 D inches
Weight: Approximately 11 lb, excluding protective shipping materials
Original: One-of-a-kind painting
Presentation: Framed
Signed: Yes
Collection: Her City
Price: $6,000
Status: Available
Current Location: Resurrection AVL, Asheville, North Carolina
This original artwork is available for purchase by inquiry. Please contact the artist to confirm availability and arrange insured fine-art shipping or collection.
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