This series explores the interplay between urban landscapes and human emotion through abstract interpretations of city skylines reflected in water. Each painting captures a unique narrative, using color, texture, and form to evoke distinct moods and stories. The reflections blur the line between reality and perception, inviting viewers to explore both the external city and the internal experiences it mirrors. Through this series, the city becomes more than a backdrop—it becomes a vessel for reflection, memory, and emotion. For inquiries please contact mcalpinesofniagara@gmail.com
On display at Font Coffee Bar in Font Hill - Chromatic Tension explores the emotional pressure embedded within urban environments through layered color and architectural abstraction. The cityscape is not depicted as a literal place, but as a psychological space, compressed, vertical, and constantly in motion. The towering forms suggest buildings closing inward, creating a corridor that draws the viewer forward while simultaneously containing them.
Color acts as the primary narrative. Muted greys and weathered neutrals reference concrete, steel, and the quiet weight of the built environment, while saturated reds and magentas cut through the composition as a visceral counterforce. These heightened hues represent human presence, energy, urgency, memory, and resilience, pushing against the rigidity of the city itself. The tension between these opposing palettes reflects the lived experience of urban life: confinement and freedom, stillness and momentum, isolation and connection.
Layered brushwork and visible marks reinforce this sense of accumulation, mirroring how cities are built over time, through repetition, erasure, and renewal. Rather than offering resolution, Chromatic Tension holds the viewer in a moment of suspension, inviting them to feel the push and pull between structure and emotion, order and expression.
36”x48” Stretched Canvas
Sold - Chicago - City of Ember Rain captures the twin city caught between fading warmth and gathering darkness, a skyline dissolving beneath a storm of molten light. The painting uses layered, abstract brushstrokes to create a sense of a place both enduring and eroding, as if the urban world is being rewritten by fire, memory, and atmosphere.
The gold and amber tones that drip from the sky evoke the feeling of heat settling over a tired city, a mixture of hope, exhaustion, and renewal. They fall like glowing rain, suggesting a moment where something heavenly or dangerous is descending. These colours hold dual meanings: the warmth of resilience and the burn of pressure, reflecting how cities often glow brightest in their hardest moments.
The deep browns and blacks in the lower half root the piece in weight and reality. These darker blocks feel heavy, almost scarred, like the emotional residue of countless lives stacked upon each other. They speak to longevity, struggle, and the shadows we hide within dense concrete worlds.
The vertical streaks, those long, dripping columns, mirror the shapes of buildings while also unraveling them. They give the sense that the city is melting, weeping, or shedding its old skin, expressing the emotional duality of transformation: both the fear of collapse and the beauty of becoming something new.
Throughout the painting, the scattered specks and blotched textures feel like sparks or remnants, adding a sense of movement and unease. They represent the human presence, messy, unpredictable, and alive, within an environment that towers over the people who built it.
Together, the colours and strokes form a city suspended in its own ember-filled rainstorm, a place glowing through adversity, trembling with emotion, and standing tall even as it shimmers on the edge of change.
Stretched Canvas 24” x 36”
This piece captures the pulse of Toronto’s urban core, the rhythm, noise, and quiet resilience that live within its aging brick buildings. The layered textures and vivid reds evoke the warmth and intensity of city life, while shadowed tones hint at the stories time has etched into its walls.
This abstract work reflects how history and renewal coexist in Toronto’s architecture. Beneath the surface of colour and chaos lies a structure that has witnessed countless changes, much like the city itself. The overlapping brushstrokes and transparent washes mirror the movement of people, light, and emotion that pass through the streets every day.
“Heat of the Street” stands as both a memory and a heartbeat, a reminder that even as the skyline evolves, the soul of the city endures.
Stretched Canvas 20" x 24"
This piece portrays an urban landscape consumed by intensity, not just in flames, but in energy, ambition, and unrest. The work channels the heat of human passion and conflict, where towering structures become silhouettes against a burning sky. It speaks to the dual nature of fire: its power to destroy and to illuminate, to erase and to renew. In this city, the blaze is both a warning and a beacon, a reminder that every ending holds the spark of transformation.
Stretched Canvas 18" x 24"
In Resilient Horizon, the city skyline stands tall in the colors of the American flag, red, white, and blue, a tribute to strength, unity, and endurance. This piece reflects the collective spirit of a nation facing hardship, reminding us that even in times of uncertainty, our shared identity and compassion can light the way forward.
The bold brushstrokes and layered textures evoke the energy of urban life, while the glowing windows symbolize hope and connection across communities. Resilient Horizon is a visual testament to standing together, one people, under one sky, moving toward a brighter dawn.
Stretched Canvas 20" x 24"
Currently not available - Echoes of Frosted Towers captures a city caught between stillness and transformation, its skyline softened into memory-like shapes. The painting blurs the boundary between form and atmosphere, allowing the viewer to feel the city rather than simply see it.
The cool whites and muted blues at the center evoke a sense of quiet resilience—like buildings emerging through morning frost. These pale tones suggest calm, reflection, and a gentle emotional distance, as if the city is exhaling after a long night. Hints of lavender and soft pink drift through the composition, warming the coldness just enough to reveal vulnerability beneath the surface, echoing the human emotions that pulse within any urban landscape.
Above, the textured turquoise and deep teal layers introduce tension. They represent the weight of weather, time, and collective memory pressing down on the skyline. These rich tones reflect both the beauty and the heaviness of city life—its storms, its secrets, and its constant reinvention.
Together, these colours form an emotional gradient: from serenity to strain, from clarity to haze. Echoes of Frosted Towers becomes a portrait of a city caught in transition—standing tall, yet softened by the very forces that shape it.
Stretched Canvas 24" x 36"
“Green Space” explores the tension between urban yearning and historical erasure. Painted over an abstract impression of a tree and its roots, the rising cityscape cuts diagonally across the canvas a stark reminder that the green spaces craved by city dwellers often sit atop land once stewarded by Indigenous communities. The vibrant green evokes both life and loss, while splatters and layered textures speak to a history that can’t be paved over. This piece challenges viewers to question what “green space” really means and who it once belonged to.
Stretched Canvas 18" x 24"
On display at Font Coffee Bar in Font Hill - Weathered Facades explores the quiet endurance of urban structures as vessels of memory and time. Layered surfaces and worn textures echo the way buildings absorb human presence, holding traces of movement, absence, and repetition long after the people are gone. The interplay of red and blue suggests both tension and balance, evoking heat, erosion, and resilience within a compressed architectural space.
Rather than depicting a specific place, the painting invites viewers to recognize something familiar. The feeling of standing before a city that has lived many lives. The facades appear scarred yet upright, emphasizing survival over decay. Through abstraction and layered mark-making, Weathered Facades becomes less about architecture itself and more about what remains, emotion, memory, and the quiet persistence of form.
Stretched Canvas 16" x 20"'
“Empire of Possibility” This piece envisions the city as more than a collection of buildings, it becomes a living monument to ambition, resilience, and the pursuit of dreams. The dark skyline rises boldly against a field of red, while golden lights shimmer with the promise of opportunity. Empire of Possibility reflects the spirit of those who dare to build, to aspire, and to transform their vision into reality. It is both a celebration of human potential and a reminder that every great empire begins with a dream.
Stretched Canvas 18” x 24”
On display at Font Coffee Bar in Font Hill - Held Together explores the tension between stability and fracture. Layered forms suggest architectural structures under pressure, stacked, scraped, and partially erased, yet still standing. The surface carries evidence of disruption and repair, where bold red marks act as both support and stress points. Through accumulation and abrasion, the painting reflects how systems, spaces, and individuals persist despite strain, held together not by perfection, but by resilience.
Stretched Canvas 16" x 20"'
This piece captures the quiet persistence of built forms after dark. Layered blocks emerge and recede through muted grays and shadowed tones, suggesting a city softened by night. Flecks of light punctuate the surface like distant windows, hinting at unseen presence within stillness. Through accumulation, erosion, and subtle contrast, the painting reflects endurance, solitude, and the silent life of structures when the world slows.
Stretched Canvas 16" x 20"'
In Petals on Concrete, colour becomes a language of contrast and resilience. The dominant blacks suggest weight, structure, and the rigidity of built environments, forms that feel imposed, repetitive, and immovable. Against this hardness, soft pinks emerge like scattered petals, symbolizing vulnerability, tenderness, and moments of emotional presence that refuse to disappear.
Muted greys, greens, and ochres form a weathered ground, evoking erosion, memory, and time, surfaces that have absorbed impact and still remain. These colours blur into one another, creating a sense of instability and quiet movement beneath the rigid forms above. Together, the palette explores the tension between softness and strength, interruption and endurance, asking where beauty survives within constraint.
Stretched Canvas 16" x 20"'
SOLD - “Skyline Burn” captures the intense rhythm of city life through fiery tones of red and yellow, grounded in deep black and touched with gold. The painting evokes a skyline not just seen, but felt, alive with motion, heat, and the weight of human presence. Buildings rise like embers, streets pulse like veins, and the gold glimmers as fleeting hope or ambition against a backdrop of concrete intensity. It’s a portrait of the city at its most vibrant, and volatile.
Stretched Canvas 24" x 36"
SOLD - Amid the hum of a sleepless city, loneliness glows in neon. Electric Solitude captures the paradox of urban life, being surrounded by thousands, yet feeling invisible. The towering buildings, painted in fractured blues, purples, and electric greens, mirror the pulse of a city alive with movement and light, but void of true connection. Each colour hums with energy, their reflections bleeding into one another, symbolizing proximity without intimacy, people close enough to touch, yet worlds apart.
The streak of yellow cutting through the empty street becomes a path through isolation, a reminder that even in the glow of the city’s heartbeat, solitude can be the loudest sound. Beneath the shimmering facades lies quiet, a longing for connection in a landscape that never stops moving.
Stretched Canvas 36" x 48"
SOLD - This painting reflects the restless duality of night, where a city’s skyline bleeds into the sky above and mirrors itself in the waters below. The shifting tones of red, black, and blue echo the turbulence of inner conflict, where emotions collide, overlap, and transform. The canvas can be turned upside down, revealing a mirrored cityscape, two perspectives of the same place, just as a person can carry different sides within themselves. It is a reminder that identity is never fixed, but layered, shifting, and deeply human.
Stretched Canvas 24" x 36"
SOLD - Midnight Passage explores the quiet beauty of solitude within the pulse of the city. The viewer is drawn into a long, empty road that vanishes into the heart of a glowing skyline, a metaphor for the personal journey through darkness toward clarity and renewal.
The deep blues and purples evoke stillness and introspection, while the streaks of neon green and yellow hint at hope, resilience, and the light that guides us through uncertainty. The warm tones of orange and red break through like fragments of emotion, symbolizing the tension between isolation and connection in an urban landscape.
The layered textures and abstract geometry of the buildings create a dreamlike rhythm, a sense that the city itself is alive, shifting, and reflective of our own inner worlds. Midnight Passage is not just a view down an empty street; it is a passage through thought, memory, and the quiet courage to keep moving forward.
Stretched Canvas 20" x 24"
On display at Font Coffee Bar in Font Hill - This painting imagines a city not as a fixed place, but as a living memory, constructed layer by layer, moment by moment. The buildings rise in softened forms, their edges blurred by time, as if the city is being remembered rather than observed.
Warm tones of rose, crimson, and gold pulse through the lower structures, echoing human presence, movement, and accumulated stories. These colors suggest warmth, endurance, and the quiet resilience of lives lived within walls. Cooler violets, blues, and grays drift across the sky and surfaces, holding the city in a haze of distance, reflection, and calm, like evening light settling after a long day.
The layering of color mirrors the way cities evolve and nothing erased completely, everything built upon what came before. Scratches, translucencies, and overlaps allow earlier moments to remain visible, reminding us that time does not disappear, it rests, patiently, beneath the surface.
Built of Color, Held by Time is a meditation on impermanence and continuity, capturing a city suspended between what it was, what it is, and what it remembers itself to be.
Stretched Canvas 24" x 36"
SOLD - In City After-light, the interplay of colour captures the emotional pulse of an urban landscape caught between day and night. The warm tones of red and orange evoke the lingering heat and movement of the city, signifying energy, resilience, and human presence. These hues represent the emotion of persistence, the way life continues to hum even as daylight fades.
Contrasting against this warmth, the cooler greens and subtle blues in the sky introduce a sense of calm and introspection. They suggest a shift from chaos to contemplation, a moment when the city exhales and transitions into stillness. The light at the end of the street draws the viewer inward, symbolizing renewal and the quiet hope that follows the intensity of the day.
The emotional balance between warmth and coolness reflects the duality of urban life: the tension between vitality and solitude, motion and rest. City After-light invites viewers to pause within that space, to feel both the echo of the day and the serenity of what comes after.
Stretched Canvas 16" x 20"
SOLD - In Echoes of Industry, the city stands as a shadow of its former self, an echo of movement, noise, and progress now softened by time. Layers of muted blues, rust tones, and translucent washes evoke the memory of factories and skylines that once pulsed with life. The piece captures the haunting beauty of urban decay, where nature and silence begin to reclaim what was built by human hands.
Through abstraction and texture, this work reflects on impermanence, how industry, ambition, and architecture leave behind not only structures, but also a lingering spirit. Echoes of Industry invites viewers to pause within that stillness, to sense the ghosts of creation that remain long after the last machine has stopped.
Stretched Canvas 20" x 24"
Private Commission - This painting exists in the pause between contact and silence, after words have settled and before anything new is spoken. The structure emerges not as a specific home, but as the memory of one: a place once inhabited, now held at a distance and softened by time. Its edges blur into the surrounding space, suggesting how separation slowly erodes the boundary between what was shared and what now stands apart.
Muted earth tones and bruised violets evoke emotional cold, restraint, and the quiet weight that follows distance, when conversation fades and meaning lingers unspoken. The layered, weathered surface mirrors how familial memory accumulates, uneven, partially obscured, shaped as much by what is lost as by what remains.
This work is not about loss, but about living with the space in between: a stillness where connection is paused rather than erased, where nothing is resolved, and nothing is required, only held.
Stretched Canvas 24" x 36"
Sold - This painting captures the fragile tension of living between extremes. The deep reds burn with intensity, echoing the heat of conflict, anger, and passion, while the layered blues carry the weight of calm, sorrow, and reflection. The fractured white skyline rises through the divide, caught in the pull of both forces—never fully consumed, never fully at peace. It speaks to the struggle of balancing inner fire with the need for stillness, and how identity can fracture, rebuild, and shift in the space between.
Stretched Canvas 18" x 24"
SOLD - “Unwelcome Order” reflects the clash between civic resistance and imposed authority. Inspired by the protests against ICE operations and the attempted deployment of the National Guard in Chicago, the painting transforms a skyline into a symbol of defiance, a city standing its ground beneath the weight of federal command.
The colors collide in deliberate chaos. Red surges through the background like unrest, the heat of confrontation, anger, and fear spreading through the streets. Blue cuts through it, representing both the people’s calm determination and the cold enforcement of state power. The black silhouette of the skyline rises in stark contrast, sharp, unyielding, and rooted in place, embodying the spirit of a city that refuses to bend.
Through its fractured strokes and turbulent layers, Unwelcome Order explores the tension between power and autonomy, order and freedom. It is both a protest and a warning, a reminder that control imposed from above can never quiet the heartbeat of the people below.
Stretched Canvas 24" x 36"
SOLD - “Shadows of the First People” - This painting reflects the hidden histories that lie beneath the modern skyline. The dark, layered forms of the city rise upward, but they stand on land that holds far older stories, stories often overlooked or erased. The deep teals and greens evoke the living earth, water, and growth that sustained Indigenous peoples long before the skyline existed. Rusted reds cut through like scars, symbolizing both the violence of displacement and the resilience that endures. The golden edges glow like memory and sunlight, a reminder that the land remembers, even when shadows try to cover its truth.
Stretched Canvas 18” x 24”
Sold- Fragments of the Falling Sun captures the moment a city’s silhouette dissolves into the water below, blurring the line between structure and reflection. The layered gold tones drift diagonally across the canvas like pieces of evening light breaking apart as the day gives way to night. These warm streaks create a sense of movement and transition—an echo of how the world glows just before darkness settles.
The darker, textured backdrop wraps around the light, giving the impression of a city suspended between calm and chaos. The contrast lets the brightness feel earned, like hope pushing its way through the weight of the day. Every scrape and mark adds to the feeling of a place that has lived through storms, yet still catches the sun in its final, gentle descent.
This piece is about the beauty that exists in what’s imperfect, what’s fading, and what’s reflected back differently than it first appeared. It invites the viewer to see the city not as hard edges, but as softened shards of light floating across the surface of the water—reminding us that even in the heaviest moments, something golden still finds its way through.
Stretched Canvas 18” x 24”
Sold -Toronto in Chalk reimagines the city’s iconic skyline as if it were drawn on a summer sidewalk temporary, soft, and wonderfully imperfect. Though created with acrylics, the textured strokes mimic the dusty fingerprints of chalk, giving the skyline a nostalgic, childlike honesty. The diagonal sweep of pale tones across the darkened background feels like a memory being dragged back into focus, as if the city were sketched quickly before a rainstorm could wash it away. Chalk smears as if the artist attempted to wipe the chalk away.
The gentle mint and warm off-white hues soften the sharp edges Toronto is known for, turning its towers into echoes rather than monuments. These colours settle into the canvas like fleeting moments, simple, bright reminders of how cities aren’t only defined by their structures, but also by the people who see them, dream in them, and walk their streets.
Scattered circular markings float around the skyline like bubbles, chalk dust, or the abstract traces of footsteps. They add a sense of playfulness to the piece, grounding it in the everyday world where chalk drawings live and disappear.
Toronto in Chalk celebrates the beauty of the temporary, the idea that even the largest city can feel fragile, soft, and human when seen through the lens of imagination.
Stretched Canvas 18” x 24”
SOLD - The Golden Hour is a two-part exploration of connection, contrast, and the quiet poetry found in the moments just before dusk. Each canvas stands on its own—one glowing with a rich golden background, the other softened by white tones kissed with gold highlights. Yet it’s only when they are placed together that the full silhouette of the city skyline emerges, revealing a single unified horizon.
This diptych reflects the way beauty often exists in the spaces between things: light and shadow, day and night, individuality and unity. The black skyline anchors both pieces, serving as a reminder that even as our environments shift in tone and emotion, there is a constant centre holding everything together. The Golden Hour captures that fleeting time of day when the world slows, the light turns warm, and the city seems to breathe—inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and see how separate elements can come together to create something whole.
2x Stretched Canvas 18” x 24”