Anne Stevens | Digital Painting | home
Firestair World Trade Center Stair Tower , 2002

This is a digital painting that could be output as large as about 10 feet wide by 80 feet high. I envision it installed in an atrium or as a glass wall on a stairway, as a stained glass window stretching up through a building, or as a translucent banner stretched in a large open space. The painting becomes quite beautiful in at a huge scale as the pixels become visible building blocks of color making the whole of the image. This is 14 flights: each tower in the WTC had more than 90.

Details from the stairtower give a better sense of the drawing and painting issues. Ive been painting in this medium for almost six years now, and have found that this painting has taken me farther than many others.

Here are the installation views of the 911 Media Arts show in Seattle.

This painting started out as an image of the outside of the World Trade Center. I had been thinking about painting the people falling from the tower. I really struggled with the idea. When I went online and actually saw photographs of people falling, it changed everything. I couldn't paint that.

I was struck by the stories of people coming down the stair towers, by the idea that people were relatively calm and helped each other, and that the firemen were going up as the workers were headed down. I drew the stair tower and the figures in Illustrator, and then brought them into Photoshop and Painter to build the painting. I spent the summer of 2002 working on touching every figure, trying to bring them to life and at the same time commemorate their death.

I did another painting exploring the city's mourning. It is horizontal, and I think may be better broken up into smaller images.

© anne hayden stevens 2002