Brush Hour
Are architects artists? In the case of Barry Ginder, there is no debate.
The Lancaster County native, who now lives near Harrisburg, is a designer of physical buildings and a painter of two-dimensional ones.
His abstract artworks — inspired by corners of Lancaster, Philadelphia, and beyond — are translucent pieces layered on plexiglass and mylar, a mix of "precision and suggestion" employing, as his wife Suzanne K. Brandt put it, the same forces that shape lived environments around the world: "accumulation and erasure." The paintings have been exhibited in places like the Demuth Museum, named for another Lancaster native with a penchant for cityscapes.
As an architect, Ginder has worked on a Lancaster cancer center, large private homes in places like Long Island, corporate offices, hospitals, and more.
We spoke with him about the roles, why his cities have no people, what makes Pennsylvania beautiful to him, and why the hardest part of creating is sometimes knowing when to stop. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
PA Local: Were you a painter before you became an architect? Or was it the other way around?
Ginder: No, I was definitely in architecture first. But growing up I dabbled in painting, and when I was at Temple [University], because Temple's architecture school was part of the Tyler School of Art, I had the luxury of taking classes.
It sort of became ingrained in the architectural process for me. Painting became a tool in a lot of ways.
I assume there is more freedom in painting a building than actually designing one. Is that true?
In terms of architecture, the process is more or less the same. You still go through that creative process of evaluating a potential site or program, you interpret it, and you do a proposal.
But [with architectural] projects there are often multiple people involved, multiple experts in the field, whether it's health care or higher education, and there's a lot of interacting with people with different strengths, and you're trying to pull all that together to make a proposal.
Painting is fundamentally [a solitary] process. I do get outside critiques to evaluate what I've done … but it's a bit more internal.
Your paintings of cities are notably free of humans. Is that intentional?
It's always been a conscious decision to do that where, in the end, I'm trying to find the essence of the place, and it's more about the architecture or the forms that I see, or the line work.
It's more about that than it is about the inhabitants of the place, almost like I'm inhabiting the architecture, and that's really what it's about, right?
You've painted cities across the mid-Atlantic. What makes Pennsylvania visually unique?
Philadelphia has always been such a great source of material. The light is incredible, especially if you're looking at the cityscape from a certain direction, and just how it changes with reflections of glass and so on.
When we had the smoke from the Canadian fires coming down, you know, there were moments when the city almost disappeared, and you would just see outlines of buildings. It's constantly changing. And that's why I enjoy doing series, it's not just one point in time.
What is the hardest part of painting a city?
Over the years, I've developed this process of painting on plexiglas, where, in a lot of ways, much like architecture, it's about finding that texture and depth in a painting, and by using the plexiglass, I sand it and I get this really amazing texture. And then throughout the process of adding thin layers of paint, or taking them away by sanding, I get this really deep sort of character to the painting.
The challenge is sometimes to recall what was done before and if you had gone too far. Because there is a portion of that information that sort of seeps through. You sort of see these hidden lines, or these palimpsests, you know, that is a residual from the previous gestures. It's all sort of chaos with a bit of order.
—Colin Deppen, newsletter editor and writer
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