FEBRUARY + MARCH, 2007

John Anderson Skygates at Burlington International Airport

If you have traveled to or from Burlington by air you will be familiar with the colorful and intricate skylight murals created by visionary Burlington architect, John Anderson.

As you drive or walk through Burlington, you will see many of Anderson's gorgeous buildings. The Champlain Chocolate Factory (both of them); The Wing Building; The Firehouse Center For The Visual Arts, The Department of Nutriton and Food Sciences UVM, and Magic Hat Brewery are among his better known works.

Anderson is also an artist and pine street art works showed his Full Scale Drawings in February and March. The small scale of the images here cannot do justice to the exhilirating impact of seeing these works in person.

Doorway, drawing by John Anderson

John Anderson writes about his drawings:

The Full Scale Drawings were made over a 4 year period, 1998 to 2002, to respond to a desire I had to work at a larger scale, off the drawing
board, a scale that affected space itself, the space between the viewer
and the work. The series became a precursor to the even larger
architectural murals I completed between 2000 and 2005 The Full Scale Drawings led then to projects that defined, even created, fully three dimensional architectural space.

They represent a transition from making space as an architect to making
space as an artist (even as I discovered that the two approaches are
really the same thing).

Bridge, drawing by John Anderson

These drawings are created with mixed media on 140# cold pressed paper.
The media include graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, lumber crayon,
snapped chalk line, masking tape, water color, dry pigment, roofing
tar, brick dust, concrete dust and rust. "Full Scale" in the title of
these drawings refers to the following: First, they are generally life
size drawings of objects and architectural materials. Second, the sizes
of the images are related to the scale of the human viewer. Third, this
scale relationship allows the drawings to engage the viewer directly
and viscerally, creating a real spatial interaction in real time. The
combinations of media, which vary from drawing to drawing, relate to
architectural construction in two ways. The media include those
actually used during construction by carpenters as they recreate the
architect's drawings at full scale with lumber crayon, carpenter's
pencil, chalk line and tape. Also, the media sometimes include
materials found in the construction of architecture such as brick dust
and roofing tar. The scale and treatment of the drawings allows them to
be appreciated from a long distance, but they also have fine and
surprising detail which rewards close inspection. The drawings are
unframed and usually are hung by being pinned or nailed to a wall, but
some have been successfully hung in shadow box type frames.