is for. With the New York drawings, I used to just take
the pictures home and put them in a drawer.”
One of her most memorable visits to New York came
in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
Lucinda spent time drawing the World Trade Center site,
which became known as Ground Zero. “It was a strange
experience because it was like looking at the lack of
something. Before [9/11] you would look down a street
and see the Twin Towers, but now you wouldn’t see
anything. How do you draw that?”
She began answering the question by focusing on the
detritus surrounding the cordoned-off site, completing
drawings of trucks loaded with bent metal. A friend in the
clergy then invited Lucinda to St Paul’s Chapel, a nearby
episcopal church that served as a place of rest and refuge
to workers. It was here that the focus of her drawings
shifted towards the human responses to the atrocities.
Though nothing else in her portfolio before or since was
borne of such devastating tragedy, the 9/11 drawings fit
into a wider theme in Lucinda’s portfolio of the ever-
changing nature of cities. Many of the subjects in her early
drawings of London and New York no longer exist and she
has tackled the effects of gentrification in many of her
works too. She struggles to engage artistically with what
she calls “spreadsheet architecture”, the large geometric
buildings with “no human qualities” that could be drawn
with a ruler, though she makes an exception for the
skyscrapers on 6th Avenue near to the Museum of Modern
Art and the Radio City Music Hall. “I’ve always found that
part of New York rather thrilling,” she says.
A recent commission for the House of Illustration back
in London saw Lucinda complete a portfolio of drawingsI had faith that I could
find 1,000 people to
buy my New York book