For over 40 years, I have been an oil painter of the urban landscape. The older buildings and side streets of New York hold a special fascination for me as I try to capture  the texture, detail,  and especially the light of the city. My work documents what is so familiar that you can walk by without noticing it, and yet tomorrow it may be gone.

I am a realist painter who sees the soul of the city through time. Time changes buildings, casting shadows at different hours of the day, turning concrete brick, stone and wood into patterned abstraction — if you are looking. I am intrigued by reflections, by the paradox of seemingly fixed materials in transition, depending on the sky, the sun, the moment.

As an artist, I am in love with the city's dynamism. I record the architecture of the city not to suspend it in an amber of nostalgia, but because to me history is animate, alive in these constructions, which represent an abstract order, a symmetry of dailiness.

My work is in the tradition of such painters as Hopper. As he told the story of time through the buildings of a small town, so I narrate the city of New York, each building, window and architectural ornament telling its unique tale.

Sharon Florin