NEW YORKER by db Waterman

The Wyndham New Yorker Hotel is a historic hotel located at 481 Eighth Avenue in New York City, United States. The 43-story Art Deco hotel, opened 1930, is a 1,083-room, mid-priced hotel. It is located in Manhattan's Garment District and Hell's Kitchen neighborhoods, near Pennsylvania Station, Madison Square Garden, and Times Square. The 1-million-square-foot (93,000-square-metre) building offers two restaurants and approximately 33,000 square feet (3,100 m2) of conference space. Since re-opening as a hotel in 1994, it has undergone approximately $100 million in capital improvements, including lobby and room renovations and infrastructure modernization. The Unification Church purchased the building in 1975, and since 2014, it has been part of the Wyndham Hotels & Resorts chain.

All my artworks are inspired by weathered walls with posters, peeling paint and all sorts of things in decline.
I try to create something new, something beautiful with these elements.

This artwork is offered by db Waterman

I remembered that as a young girl I so much liked to cut images from magazines to paste them into school agendas, scrapbooks and even on my bedroom door. Add to this the fascination I always had for walls filled with old posters, flaking paint, scrappy billboards and weathered paint, it opened an unexpected door for completely new opportunities. Completely unintended I found a new way of working, I felt pleasurably and comfortably at home in. What started out as copying old walls with worn out posters has grown into many series of new visual storytelling. Not simply just eclecticism, but bringing together many seemingly incoherent story lines into one completely new story, my own personal story. Initially it lacked the one thing that is important to me, the transparency that normally only is possible with the use of watercolor. The unforgiving layering of transparent watercolors is a challenge I would not want to miss and after a lot of trial and error I finally succeeded in getting the collages as transparent as a watercolor. Every layer of paper, oil, acrylic, pencil, crayon, ballpoint, watercolor, ink, charcoal and whatever else I use, remains visible in the artwork. You can imagine it made me feel the queen of the ball !

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• All artworks by db Waterman
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