Copper look at NY City

The Herald Sun, 4 April, 2008

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Cityscapes of New York
Marco Luccio
April 1 - 27
Steps Gallery
62 Lygon St Carlton South
Monday to Sunday 10 - 5pm
www.marcoluccio.com

When printmaker Marco Luccio first sunk his teeth into the Big Apple he thought he'd taken much more than he could chew.

'It was really overwhelming,' he said, 'For the first ten days I actually doubted I could do anything worthwhile. There were so many different angles and rooftops and shapes and windows and people's legs, so many different things in the same view.'

But he wasn't going to let it beat him. Italian born Luccio has tackled major iconic cities before - first with Melbourne and Sydney, then Florence and Paris - to critical acclaim. He's had his showdowns with architectural icons like the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and Il Duomo in Florence. Exploring the urban environment has been at the core of his artistic practice since he graduated from RMIT in 1992. He nearly always does his work on site, using a physically demanding method of scratching marks straight onto the copper plate to make his expressive drypoints.

'New York is the reason I make city images,' he says, 'I've been wanting to get there for 15 years.'

Luckily for him, he and his wife, artist Debra Luccio, had ten weeks in New York and more than 42 copper plates and countless sketchbooks to work out how to respond to the ultimate metropolis. And the results of his efforts will be on shown next month.

While Debra focused on documenting dance companies, Marco went head to head with the landmarks of 20th century capitalism - The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Flatiron Building, Grand Central Station and the city's striking bridges connecting the island of Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens.

'I remember the first morning getting up on the rooftop of where we were staying and the city was just so big and unpredictable. There was just so much information. I thought I better start something. With my first drawing I was struggling to fit everything into a double page sketchbook and it was taking so long I had to find a different way of drawing. I actually discovered a new short hand for myself. I found myself doing the same scene over and over trying to find a language for it. My eyes were just hanging out of my head in New York there was just so much there.'

Aside from the sheer scale of the city, there were other obstacles.

When he was drawing from the top of the Empire State Building he couldn't even take toilet breaks or he would have had to pay again to resume his spot. He also had to cope with a security guard who felt the need to commentate on the progress of the drawing as if it was a performance.

'I always had swarms of people around me, at one stage kids were almost sitting on my shoulders and one guy even held the sketchbook for me so it wouldn't blow away. I found that it was one of the most engaging places for me but also it was quite an intense invasion,' he said. 'On the corner of Lexington and 42nd street four people asked me if the piece was for sale and a druggie nearly landed on me outside the Chrysler building.'