GENE SCULATTI

First published: Spring 2025

Ever since childhood, music journalist Gene Sculatti has drawn cityscapes that sprawl, with dynamism and rhythm, across huge white scrolls

Gene Sculatti has a loving obsession with city streets and neighbourhoods. He has been drawing them for most of his life, starting as a child in Northern California, creating meticulous renderings of fictional cityscapes that unfurl along lengthy scrolls of paper. In pen, crayon and watercolour, he has spent decades creating his grand boulevards and side streets, homes and office towers, theatres and comedy clubs, street lamps and telephone wires.

Beacon Seafood Lighthouse (detail from Seagate, 2021–2022, 16 ft x 20 in. / 5 m x 51 cm); courtesy: Gene Sculatti

Sculatti’s professional life has been as a music journalist and critic, including 13 years as an editor at Billboard, the American music industry bible, and with multiple bylines in magazines including Rolling Stone. He is also author of several cultural history books, such as 1982’s Catalog of Cool. And yet he has always returned happily to the drawing table, making his open-ended microcosms of imagined cities, seen from an omniscient bird’s eye view, with elements recalled from Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and other towns, much smaller.

Calso Water (detail from West Wolseth, 2022–2023, 14 ft x 24 in. / 4.5 m x 61 cm); courtesy: Gene Sculatti

The art has mostly been a private avocation shared with friends, rarely seen outside of his home in the quiet LA suburb of Northridge. Sculatti’s studio is a small spare bedroom in his house where he works from a drawing table by the window, with a couple of Labrador retrievers to keep him company. His life’s work as an artist leans against a wall: a dozen or so scrolls of paper on which he has drawn vivid pictorial maps that stretch to a massive scale, the longest 190 feet long, some years in the making.