In an inspired marriage of style and subject matter, Wilmington, North Carolina-based artist and professor Courtney Johnson used a process called cliché-verre to create her Glass Cities series. “Historically employed during times of change, cliché-verre serves as a bridge between the past and the future as we transition into the digital era, and also as we move from the era of landscape to the cityscape,” she writes. “The images in this series depict characters in our new global mythological system: cities.” By painting on glass and then scanning, enlarging, and printing her pictures photographically, she renders New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Rome, and other iconic global metropolises in a way that’s far from hyperrealistic but fully captures the experience of taking in a city lit up after dark, all ecstatically blurry lights against a background of pitch black or deep blue. Click through to see some of our favorite images from Glass Cities, which we discovered via Faith is Torment, and visit Johnson’s website to see the rest of the series and learn more about her work.
Image credit: Courtney Johnson
Image credit: Courtney Johnson
Image credit: Courtney Johnson
Image credit: Courtney Johnson
Image credit: Courtney Johnson
Image credit: Courtney Johnson
Image credit: Courtney Johnson
Image credit: Courtney Johnson
Image credit: Courtney Johnson
Image credit: Courtney Johnson