Street to Mbari 1964

Jacob Lawrence made this print, Street to Mbari, and I’m immediately drawn to the shapes and how they come together. It looks almost like the cut-out shapes I’d use to make a painting, laid flat. The surface has this incredible flatness to it, with shapes that are opaque and bump right up against each other. Look how the bodies are built from solid blocks of colour, with no tonal variation. Then there are the lovely striations of the striped awnings, and the piles of stuff on people’s heads in blues and whites, like little abstracted landscapes! What’s really fascinating is the way the foreground figures lead your eye into this swarm of tiny people in the background. The whole thing feels like a bustling cityscape made of layered geometries. It reminds me a little of Stuart Davis. The image asks us to see the world in a new way, one that embraces both abstraction and representation.