Velocity of Vision: Bringing Cities to Life
After exploring motion in my character portraits, I wanted to push further outward—to the environments that have always inspired me: cities.
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with cityscapes. Growing up in southern Connecticut, not far from New York City, I was mesmerized by its rhythm—the light, the architecture, the sheer density of life packed into every street. That energy has never left me. Over the years, it’s shown up again and again in my paintings: crowded skylines, luminous towers, and futuristic metropolises that hover somewhere between utopia and dystopia.
Architecture, to me, is one of the purest portrait of civilization. It reflects belief, ambition, and fear. I’ve spent years studying how architectural movements rise from culture and politics—how a cathedral or a megastructure tells us exactly who we were at that moment in time. Lately, I’ve been drawn to the next chapter of that story: futuristic architecture and how evolving materials and technologies might reshape the cities of tomorrow.
For this piece, I wanted to show motion—not just physical movement, but the living rhythm of a futuristic city. Using Runway Gen-4, Veo 3, and Seedance 1.0 Pro, I began animating my painted skylines—adding the hum of light, the drift of vehicles, and the pulse of atmosphere.
This was also the first time I incorporated AI-generated imagery into my workflow. To create the sheer number of cityscapes required for the piece, I used Midjourney as a generative sketch partner—specifically experimenting with its Omni Reference feature. The process became cyclical: I’d generate an image, paint over it by hand to refine the composition and tone, and then feed that painted version back into Midjourney so it could learn from my style. Over time, the results began to echo my own visual language, merging the intuition of the painter with the computational eye of the model.
What I discovered along the way is that these tools tend to excel with objects and environments more than people. Human anatomy is complex and deeply coded into our perception—one wrong pixel and you tumble into the uncanny valley. But with architecture, vehicles, and light, the models flourish. They see structure and rhythm in ways that amplify what I already love about design.
The result feels alive—streets breathing, towers glowing, clouds sliding between steel and glass. Whether the city feels like a dream or a warning depends on the viewer, but that duality is what draws me to it.
This experiment reminded me why I love cities: they are mirrors of who we are and who we might become. And now, seeing one of my painted worlds finally move, I can feel the same pulse I imagined years ago when I first put brush to skyline.
