‘A Glass Waltz’ is inspired by a visit to Vienna the artist made in late 2023. Drawing from sketches, photographs, and digital models, Nathan Walsh constructed a fictional cityscape that blends observation, memory, and invention. The painting is not a literal view of Vienna, but a reimagined space where time and perspective fold into one another.

While previous works have engaged with the city as a site of structured observation, this painting allows for a freer, more fluid orchestration of space, narrative, and time. It is both a continuation and a rupture — advancing my exploration of the urban environment by letting go of more straightforward rules of perspectival drawing and picture making.

The title plays on the fragility and elegance of both the Viennese cityscape and its layered histories. The “waltz” refers not only to the city’s musical heritage but to the structure of the painting itself — a visual choreography in which space and time revolve rather than progress in linear fashion. And “glass” is central: not just as material, but as metaphor — for transparency, reflection, mediation, and the simultaneous intimacy and distance of looking.

Rather than presenting a static moment, Walsh has constructed a multiplicity of experiences within a single image — where the café interior folds into the street, reflections dissolve solidity, and elements from classical culture interject into modern life. On the left, a ghostlike rendering of the Plague Column (Pestsäule) emerges, not in solid marble but as a translucent monument—an emblem of Baroque devotion and civic trauma. On the right, a pair of polychrome putti float incongruously against a contemporary façade, like corrupted data from an art historical archive. At the center, a woman stands absorbed in her smartphone, oblivious to the architectural drama around her — her posture a quiet emblem of digital-age self-containment. Above her what appears to be a loading icon hovers in the sky: a suggestion of temporal suspension—perhaps even the painting’s own awareness of being caught in a constant state of historical buffering.

The goal has been to re-present Vienna not through traditional realist painting or the limiting strategies of photorealism. Instead Nathan Walsh proposes a solution that explores how space is mediated, remembered and constructed. If the painting is seen as realistic then its not because it looks “life-like” but more how it reflects how experience is now assembled from fragments both analog and digital. It is not a documentation of a city, but a reconstruction of how we encounter it now: as layered, mediated, fractured, and still somehow whole.