The Making of a Fresco, Showing The Building of a City 1931

Diego Rivera made this fresco in San Francisco, showing the building of a city! It's a total construction site, with workers swarming all over scaffolding, and this massive head looking down, like some kind of foreman, or is it Rivera himself? I can just imagine him up there, wrestling with the wet plaster, trying to capture the energy of this new city being built. You can almost feel the grit and sweat in the air. And I'm thinking about all those Renaissance artists, covering ceilings in Rome, bodies aching, paint dripping. There's a real physicality to this piece. It feels like Rivera is digging into the surface, trying to unearth something essential about work, progress, and the human spirit. That dark grey palette really sets the tone. It’s about the labour involved in the making. He's in conversation with them all, riffing on their themes, pushing the boundaries of what painting can be. It's an ongoing dialogue, this back-and-forth across time. And that's what makes art so exciting, right? We keep learning from each other, building on what came before, and finding our own way to express the messy, beautiful truth.