The great 'scape: Braddock's industrial past is captured using a dying art
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Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette
Artist Craig McPherson in front of his pastel on linen work depicting the Edgar Thomson steel mill in Braddock.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
NEW YORK -- Craig McPherson chose a nearly lost art to depict a dying one after his first time through the Fort Pitt Tunnel, into the night of Pittsburgh.
Steve Mellon, Post-GazetteReviving a lost art, Craig McPherson made some of his own tools to work in mezzotint, a painstaking process that requires long hours of roughening a copper plate before ink can be applied. This work shows a street in Braddock and, beyond, the Edgar Thomson Works.
Click photo for larger image.
Where: A number of Craig McPherson's steel works, as well as works inspired by theater, are on display through May 27 at the Forum Gallery, 745 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street, New York.Information: 212-355-4545. It was 1982, and his Braddock-born fiancee, May Miculis, was driving.
"It was an overcast winter night, and, looking up the river as we emerged from the tunnel, you could see two sprawling steel mills in the distance," wrote McPherson, a New York artist. "Just then, the sky flared from a pour [of molten steel], orange through gray clouds of smoke, which was reflected the length of the river."
He was drawn to the mills and visited them on annual trips to Pittsburgh to visit May's family, making drawings from perches near the mills in Braddock and Clairton.
The works that evolved from those visits, as well as others of a range of subjects from chop shops to Yankee Stadium to world harbors, have made McPherson a significant artist.
His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the British Museum in London; the Art Institute in Chicago, the Cleveland Museum; the Library of Congress; the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of Art in New York; and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
His gigantic mural cycle of world harbors, commissioned by the American Express Co. for its corporate headquarters, stretches 400 feet around the lobby of the building.
First Published May 22, 2005 12:00 am
