Book Review: The City Scene from the Sidewalk by Alex Price

The City Scene from the Sidewalk is a 90-page hardcover with watercolour paintings and stories by Alex Price, an artist and author who living in the Lower East Side of New York City.

All the artworks in this book are watercolour paintings, not watercolour sketches with outline. The look and feel is very different from the many travelogue sketchbooks I've featured.

The paintings are beautiful. Some of them are really detailed. There's this painting of rooftops of the buildings that looks so daunting to paint. And then there are the busy streets with fast walking pedestrians, heavy traffic and cyclists. There are details of murals sprayed on the walls, intricate carvings commonly seen on buildings built decades ago, fire escape staircases, facades of buildings that stretched along the long straight Manhattan streets.

I'm always impressed by full-on paintings. Each painting in this book must have taken a lot of time to paint.

There's plenty of text to read. The stories are of Price's personal experiences when he first moved to New York City. The writing style is kinda poetic and you can definitely sense that he has lived long in the city. He talks about interesting things about the neighbourhood, streets, alleys that receive almost no sun, and how he walked into a tree once.

This book feels like a very personal project. I really enjoyed reading the stories.

The City Scene from the Sidewalk is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN)

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