Like January’s other award winner, this painting evokes a strong sense of place, transporting the viewer instantly. Unlike that landscape, however, Sardar Aziz’s cityscape, titled dConstruction, is a bustling hive of human activity. (Can you hear the honking?)

Juror Ephraim Rubenstein, who gave this painting The Art League Award, noted the painting’s ambition and the artist’s success in pulling off many feats at once. We talked to the artist to get some more details about this piece:

What was your goal for dConstruction?
Sardar Aziz: I wanted to capture how we as humans build a city and then rebuild it, right from the ground up, again and again. It seems like a never-ending process.

What made you stop and notice this scene?
The effort of the people to improve things, and the colors of construction machinery and taxis against the tallest buildings of New York City.

What do you think makes a good painting of a cityscape?
A good painting has a good subject and the right color harmony with appealing design.

If one is able to capture the character of the architecture and its relation to the town and place humans around it in a way that everything creates harmony, I believe that can be a good landscape painting.

Why are you a painter? How long have you been one?
I knew I was a painter right from the beginning, but most of my life I did not paint. I started painting full time not long time ago. Why am I a painter? Honestly I don’t know.

When did you start painting full-time? Was it a difficult transition?
Adopting painting as a profession was always hard throughout the history and it hasn’t changed.

I started my career as a full-time painter only five years ago. It was a very hard and difficult transition for me. Sometimes things got harder financially and I had to take some odd jobs to pay my bills. I photograph, I do television productions, documentaries, and sometime post productions of films to meet ends. At the end if I paint and keep things going in the right direction, it’s all worth it.

What’s your creative process like — where do you get ideas, and how do you know when a painting is complete?
I watch people when I go into the city: how they behave, act and react with other people, and with architecture of a city. Once in awhile you got an idea from a person or from architecture.

If my painting is in the studio it’s not done. I often work on the paintings I exhibited several times on several places. However there are very few paintings, they are done. I know because they told me themselves.

The January Open Exhibit is on view through Sunday, February 4.