Artists Vs. Photographers

I talked to my uncle Mark Schlesinger who is an established contemporary artist and is currently commissioned by the San Antonio River Foundation to create public art as a part of the Mission Reach Ecosystem Restoration and Recreation Project. He uses the concrete of the Ninth Street underpass and bridge as his canvas for experimenting with space and perception. His vibrant art creates a complete environment under the bridge that enthralls viewers with texture, form and color.

By day, light appears to travel in zigzag paths through the large cubes that are part of his installation. By night, bands of color across the ceiling of the underpass glow to create a colorful portal of illumination and reflection.

His second public work on the river walk is “UP on the ON” which is a large-scale abstract painting.

Mark is entirely inspired by nature and his goal is to make the river walk be apart of nature. He likes to work in the dead of night so that he is not distracted. When he was a contemporary artist in New York, his studio looked like a science experiment. There were colors splattered everywhere, shapes placed in random places, and weird objects floating around. His studio in San Antonio is the same way, except now it glows non-stop. He recently developed a glow-in-the-dark concrete for his bridge project, but now his apartment won’t stop glowing, which makes it difficult to work there at night.

Since he’s been painting the river walk, he’s been working outside. Mark says he looks at the colors of the surrounding wildflowers for inspiration. The vibrant colors are echoed in “UP on the ON”.

Using the glowing concrete he created, he hand-painted an asymmetrical design in a kinetic palette of red, gold, purple, magenta, blue and green. Eight of the blocks — painted in swirls that evoke the play of light on water — glow at night. Mark said, “What I wanted to do was create a sequence — a sequence of colors that reify the movement across the bridge.” Mark said he wanted to choose a bright palette. “The key to choosing a palette was making it bright. The second key was the wildflowers that I knew were going to be in abundance, and the third key was its relationship to the water in the sky.”

“UP and the ON” is supposed to seem like a very abstract walk through a field of wildflowers. For the project, Mark thought asked, “If a bridge were alive, what would it look like, what would it be?” According to Mark, in nature, colors are used to differentiate, attract, repel — basically for communication.