The Sky's The Limit

Megan Craig could not paint for some time after 9/11. She was in the lobby of one of the towers when the first plane hit, and then she moved to New Haven, where she's established herself as an artist with her feet on the ground but her heart in the clouds.

Craig paints cityscapes and rooftops. It was what she was doing in the weeks before 9/11, when she was among a handful of artists painting New York from a unique perspective - the 91st floor of the World Trade Center.

"My perspective on any given day still begins 91 stories up," Craig said. "All of my new work owes something to the lessons I learned at the World Trade Center. I wonder about the tops of things now."

In the years since coming to New Haven, Craig has earned a top spot among a cadre of the city's veteran roofscape artists - those who prefer a celestial view of the Elm City. This spring, New Haven art galleries are showcasing some of those rooftop artists. There is a planned Craig showing at June's Arts & Ideas festival and a recently opened exhibit of the roofscape work of longtime local artists Constance LaPalombara and Frank Bruckmann at downtown's Gallery 195.

Roofscape painting appears to be an increasingly attractive genre to New Haven painters as the city grows and revives.

When Craig, a Yale graduate, came back to New Haven, she sought out her own rooftops from which to paint. Since then, she's gained higher ground - and, therefore, different vistas - thanks to the efforts of the well-known LaPalombara.

LaPalombara tried her first roofscape 16 years ago as a natural outgrowth of her interest in urban landscapes. It wasn't long before she realized what a hindrance New England weather can be to painting.

"If you're going to be a landscape painter in the Northeast, unless you want to go out in cold and snow, you're going to have to do something else during the winter," said LaPalombara, who took her first roofscape studio in a building on State Street.

With a few years and quite a few towering paintings in her portfolio, LaPalombara approached the Greater New Haven Arts Council about starting a seasonal collective by opening office building floors undergoing renovation to artists. The response, says LaPalombara, was overwhelming. "We got together five or six landscape painters the first year we started [seven years ago]. Every year, the bank gives us a different space in the building, and every year we get more painters."

Frank Bruckmann, a photo-realistic artist known locally for his portraits and rural landscapes, joined the winter collective four years into the project.

"It's kind of nice to say you're going to the office for work and spend half a day painting some beautiful angles - nice sunsets from over the Sound, views of the Q Bridge," Bruckmann said. "I can be an architect, grab a certain portion of the city and rearrange it whenever I feel like it."

LaPalombara's and Bruckmann's "New Haven" show at Gallery 195 focuses on both artists' time high above street level during the past two winters. LaPalombara, a self-described "dreamy type who responds to the way light and shadow interact above ground," has submitted several studies of East Rock's influence on downtown.

Bruckmann's portion of the exhibit features several close-ups of the Yale Clock Tower awash in brilliant sunlight as well as many softer works depicting an Elm City in the midst of a snowstorm.

"People are continually interested in growth around cities, especially as the skyscrapers get taller and taller," said Denise Markonish, director of the Artspace Gallery, which also sponsors a roofscape residency. "There's also a harkening back to the old city blocks beneath them, a romantic ideal of the downtown."

A Different Plane

As with her predecessors, Craig's painting initially looked skyward, out of necessity. Yale had ingrained in her a more traditional approach to painting, but once Craig moved to New York, her inspiration started to come from her environment.

"[The buildings] were there," Craig said. "They were my landscape."

Into her third year living in the city, Craig, who became a kindergarten teacher, a bartender and then a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the New School ("It was the most practical thing to do so I could paint," she said), heard about a Lower Manhattan Cultural Center program granting working artists access for five months to unused space in the Twin Towers. The rooftop painter applied and, to her surprise, was accepted in the spring of 2001.

"Being inside the World Trade Center changed how I felt about the city. Everything looked so beautiful and so quiet," Craig said. "I had never thought much about those two buildings much before, but after painting from the sixth floor of my apartment, it was mind-blowing."

From the 91st floor, Craig, along with several other New York artists painted all six boroughs. "I would ride the elevators with the businessmen and the tourists covered with paint. I felt as if I had infiltrated the place," she said.

Craig produced 35 paintings during her time there. She started with a literal approach to the skyscrapers surrounding her, and then soon her style took on a more surrealistic flavor as she began to humanize her atmospheric environment.

"The shapes you paint become characters with distinct personalities," Craig wrote in an essay for a catalog of a recent German exhibition, "Views."

"One Penn Plaza always seemed like a bully who was really just insecure. Certain rooftops were proud; others were shy. ... I would come back to the studio and try to get them all down."

Craig had just entered the lobby of Tower I on Sept. 11, 2001 when the first plane hit one floor above her studio, killing one of the artists with whom she worked. With most of downtown Manhattan, she fled, leaving behind all but one of the 35 paintings she had created during her time there. The one she retains is a vibrant, 3-foot-long landscape looking down on the East Side. She doesn't intend to sell it.

"Having lost a lot of work there, I want to hang on to this," she said. "It's also hard to separate paintings from artifacts. I never want my paintings to be artifacts."

Though she feels in the post 9/11-era that architects should curtail their desire to touch the heavens, that hasn't stopped Craig - who plans to teach philosophy and continue painting - from finding a higher place to set her easel.

"I love the chaos of rooftops, the endless jumble," she said.