(34.5"x34.5" paper size, image size 31.5"x31.5") (21.25"x21.25" paper size, image size: 18.125"x18.125") signed and editioned on reverse, limited edition of 5. This limited edition print by Montreal artist, Ross Racine, depicts an abstract aerial view of an urban landscape. The artist has transitioned the grid-like road structure into a pinwheel design in the center. Ochre, green pinks and yellow give a visual texture to the ground. Each building is drawn by hand using digital drawing technique, with an eye for detail and composition.

Racine’s work is photorealistic, but not photographic, it is completely created from beginning to end by Racine without a camera or a photographic reference. Racine is an omniscient surveillance camera in the sky, his world is filled with the contradictory bravado of a demented city planner. His suburbs have no zoning, roads go nowhere, or way too far. They are at once wholly improbable and completely possible, and they remind us how misguided we can be. They poke fun at human nature, at grandiosity, and impracticality.

Racine’s works are line and texture, with the flattened plane of a satellite photograph—no horizon line, no sky. The subtle tones and photographic grain often veer almost to complete abstraction, only to be brought back by what is undeniably a house with trees around it and a garage. The buildings themselves become patterns, the uniform and also very random lines of the streets and the patchwork grains in the fields form uneven grids. These works on paper have as much in common with oriental rugs or quilted blankets as they do with Google maps. They tell a story.

Ross Racine is an artist living in Montreal (Quebec), Canada, and New York. Racine's works are drawn freehand on a computer; no photographs are used in the process. These drawings of aerial views use the distant, perpendicular mode of viewing for its reflective capabilities as a way of thinking about design, the city and society in general. His prints have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Canada and Europe, most recently at the Des Moines Art Center, the Künstlerhaus (Vienna, Austria), the International Print Triennial (Katowice, Poland), the Koffler Centre Gallery (Toronto), the International Print... Center (New York) and the Front Room Gallery (New York). A selection of Racine's prints has won the biennial prize at the 2011 Biennale internationale de Gravure contemporaine in Liège, Belgium. His work is in several collections, including the New York Public Library Print Collection, the Des Moines Art Center, the Johnson & Johnson collection and the Hallmark collection.