Innerbelt Road, Somerville MA

[nk]

I have spent the last 5 years working on this semi-industrial road whilst my workplace at Harvard Square gets renovated.



I did find something appealing about the road...when I stood at the curb and looked toward the centre, the parallel lines reminded me of the x-sections of the Earth's atmoshpere I used to gaze at as a kid, and I also thought of a drawing by Cy Twombly drawing called Apollo which has the different atmospheres marked in metres amongst many other things.

The biggest challenge was the composition. I tried for a long time to get a gentle curve that worked, I looked at Ellsworth Kelly's plywood cut-outs, I looked at photos of the Earth from space and I could not get it to work, until I narrowed my focus...and this is what I came up with (the q-tips are unused!)



And I went on from there with very standard techniques. Here it is with the asphalt laid and the errosion around the line markers carved out



And here is a final overall shot followed by a detail






Please excuse my iPhone photography and thanks for looking.
Narayan

[Chuck Doan]

That is a nice piece!

[finescalerr]

Nice photos, especially considering you used an iPhone. -- Russ

[chester]

Good to see you working on something N. Nice job.

[Ray Dunakin]

Really interesting and unusual piece!

[nk]

Thanks for the comments gents. I appreciate the time you took to look.

I am drawing up plans for the next project, a section of Av Paulista outside MASP, from Sao Paulo, Brazil. It has this very cool black and white mosaic stonework in the media strip, very characteritic of Portuguese towns. I looked just recently on google maps and it has all been painted over, a great shame if you ask me. I a glad I took lots of reference shots when I did. I will post in progress pics as I go.

[finescalerr]

Yes, please keep us up to date. -- Russ

[BKLN]

Narayan,
I suspect that the majority of this forum would appreciate if your next project would be a section of the mosaic promenade of Ipanema or Copacabana beach. That way we could hope for some bikinis in the reference shots?!

Christian

[finescalerr]

Thank you for that suggestion. If I make any difference at all in the world, ensuring an abundance of beautiful girls in thong bikinis would be my penultimate contribution. -- Russ

[nk]

My mind is reeling from what I imagine is your ultimate contribution...

[Hydrostat]

Narayan,

very nice composition and choice of cutout! I like the blotches of marking paint. Would you please show us some detail pics of the broken asphalt?

Volker

[nk]

Volker I will take some more photos and post them in the next few days. I did carve out the area around the islands of paint on the traffic lines in order to simulate how the asphalt around the real lines was eroded. For the cracks in the asphalt I essentially made carborundum paper and once it was semi dry, I tore it and made the desired cracks, then glued the whole thing to the base and "steam-rollered" it with some copper tubing.

It is the same technique I used to make the crack to the left of the picture on this now 10 year old model of the street outside my old apartment in Jamaica Plain, MA

N

[finescalerr]

Why didn't you also model the apartment? -- Russ

[nk]

Volker here are the long overdue details of the asphalt. I made the cracks by gluing the carborundum onto paper and after it has dried, ripping the paper, and then gluing it onto the base. Its a little messy, but it gives you the right parallel edges to the crack which follows lines of stress as the crack grows





Russ: The apartment would have taken me too far from the street...