RANDALL SELLERS lives and works in Philadelphia, PA

I grew up on the side of a mountain overlooking farm fields near a town called Honey Brook, in rural Pennsylvania, one hour west of Philadelphia. Our neighbors were Amish farmers and Appalachian backwoods characters: truckdrivers, mechanics guzzling canned beer in cinderblock garages, each with an acre of junkyard in the back. I had fun with the local kids. We rode dirt bikes, made secret trails and forts in the woods, and played tree tag, scrambling from branch to branch like a bunch of monkeys. We snooped around the nearby quarry and landfill. I lived for baseball and pitched for the little league team. But during my years in Honey Brook I often yearned to be elsewhere.

In 1979, I discovered the Manhattan skyline in a movie, which, along with cities in general, became my obsession for the next several years. I learned all the famous buildings and bridges: their measurements, dates of construction, who the architects were. I spent hours hunched over maps of New York City. I found an AM radio broadcast from New York and listened to the traffic reports, following the action on my map—exotic, exciting stuff for a prepubescent nerd languishing in hick hamlet.

Stationed at my bedroom desk in Honey Brook, I drew dozens of imagined views of New York City and the meadowlands of New Jersey (a menacing industrial wasteland that also fascinated me). I leafed through old issues of  National Geographic for images of cities, and began to invent my own cities on paper, with magic markers.

Then, one day in 1989, waiting for my grandparents to buy a television at the mall, I ducked into a bookstore and by chance picked up a slim paperback called The Last Days of Socrates, a collection of several of Plato’s dialogues. This ushered in another great obsession: ancient history. I visited the local library and read books about Greece and Rome. I became interested in the architecture and topography of these ancient cities the same way I admired New York a decade earlier.

I chose Tyler School of Art for the junior year abroad in Rome, where I explored the streets, piazzas, hills, and ruins. I learned the history, watched people, drank too much espresso, and by strange fortune attended Federico Fellini’s funeral. I read Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

My interest in history and cities, especially Rome, deepened and settled on the quirkier neighborhoods of ancient Rome, like the Subura. I wanted to know where the booksellers set up shop, where the prostitutes and pickpockets lurked, where the immigrants lived. Today, most of these neighborhoods are buried under 2000 years and sixty feet of accumulated building, and can be exhumed only by imagination. I was also interested in Rome of the Middle Ages: imagine, a skeleton crew of 20,000 hiding out in a city built for a million!

A favorite pastime in Rome was sneaking into the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill at night with friends, snooping around with flashlights and bottles of wine. Here we discovered the old imperial palaces, reduced to a labyrinth of hidden subterranean rooms, most of them closed to daytime tourists, choked with brambles and piles of broken marble under an inch of dust, connected by dank crawl spaces. You might say my drawings recreate something of the mystery and excitement of those evening adventures.

I view cities as theatres of desire, palimpsests, organisms, paradoxes of permanence and change. I am fascinated by their improvised, vernacular architecture; their classical and industrial programs humbled and reclaimed by nature; their prospects for the daunting, depopulated future. In today’s hyperephemeral world of blogs, pop-ups, and X Box, our collective memory burns up behind us like a bomb fuse as we swagger and stumble blindly into the future, and I have of necessity returned to my old childhood habit of playing armchair argonaut in search of distant worlds which afford some fresh mystery and extend the temporal view.

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