What if a construction worker donned in bright orange clothes invaded your back yard this afternoon? The American painter, George Tooker gives a possible reaction to this scenario in his 1952 tempera painting, Builders. He develops an average builder’s workday to show the man’s conflict with a natural world (Melrod 27). Tooker’s scene includes a middle-aged group, four men and one woman, which surrounds an incomplete wooden structure along a waterway. The image may initially seem simple, but Tooker explores the complexities of urbanization and nature by the building’s placement on previously barren land. He represents a "man versus nature" theme with the characters’ gestures, relationships, and associations to the structure and natural surroundings. As a magic realist, Tooker develops the woman’s central location to represent nature, while both the woman and men’s perspectives and facial features relate to their actions and the landscape. Through these techniques, he portrays the structure’s invasion and future dominance on formerly natural territory to address societal conflicts with urbanization.

Tooker shows his audience a conflict in Builders and Highway, another painting, using the twentieth century artistic movement, magic realism. According to Jeffrey Wechsler, magic realists make reality seem fictitious, while highlighting life’s awkwardness (293). Surrealists also address this strange reality, but they use unreal characters and situations while magic realists like Tooker disrupt the audience’s expectations with "an art of the implausible, not the impossible" (293). Tooker uniquely uses this style to show the audience that people cannot determine their future because the world has a predestined order (294). In Highway, a road patroller directing a traffic jam maintains a distance from the audience with a road sign hiding his face. This positioning gives the director anonymity, connects him to the mindless "streetlights behind him" (Garver 34), and emphasizes the drivers’ helplessness (Wechsler 293-295) with no source to blame. Tooker also uses this magic realist style to hide the destructive men in Builders. Since the audience only sees the builders’ profiles, the woman’s trouble confronting and understanding the men shows her constant struggle with urbanization.

In relation to the men in Builders, the woman’s exposure, hair, and placement represent nature, the dominating force opposing urbanization. The woman appears natural since Tooker exposes her body: bare feet, while the men wear brown work shoes; a simple, cotton dress falling right below her knees, exposing more skin than the men in pants; and her entire face rather than the men’s profiles. Tooker conceals the men’s body parts more than the woman’s to show the men’s distance from a natural life style and the woman opposition to their urbanization. In addition to covering their bodies, the men’s short, cropped haircuts show their defiance to natural growth since they trim their hair frequently. Conversely, the woman pulls her naturally, long hair behind her head. Also, the background behind the woman’s feet further defines her relationship to nature; Tooker shows a distant water source that gradually turns into a white sky. Behind the three construction men’s feet, Tooker shows wooden boards stripped from a living tree, which have gradually dominated nature through urbanization and change. Through the woman’s differences with the men and her kinship with nature, Tooker gives her a "Mother Nature" role to protect and defend the Earth.

The internationally accepted symbolism of a woman’s relationship with the environment enhances Tooker’s urbanization critique. Only the woman’s body experiences the naturally painful and pleasurable cycles of menstruation and childbirth (Milton 229). With hormonal imbalances and life-giving attributes, the woman sympathizes with environmental destruction or freedom (229). In Builders, the woman exemplifies this unique, feminist spirituality with her dissatisfied glare and gesture toward the men. Tooker uses magic realism and vagueness to force the audience to search for a reason behind her stare. This feminist’s anger toward urbanization’s impediments causes her to seek social justice through change (229).

Tooker highlights the woman’s environmental struggles, which urbanization leaders sometimes ignore or overpower, by focusing Builders on her. She stands in the structure’s door opening that serves as the painting’s focal point, while the background sky points toward her. White clouds start below the woman’s body and the white color fans out at her shoulders into bars of light blue, conveying a target-like image pointing toward her. Landscape artists use these same pathways of light to welcome the audience to a distant, purely natural world (Melrod 27). Tooker also emphasizes the woman’s central relation to the piece because the men look directly at her and face toward her, three from the front and one from the back. This attention and an angularity in the painting entrap the woman like the men entrap and invade nature, leaving little possibility to escape. The man holding the ladder and the one holding the extra board point the bottoms toward her feet, forming a V shape around the woman. This geometric, triangular V shape represents the city (Portugali 145), and how urbanization traps her in the formation’s center. The men and building in Builders, like the road blocks in Highway, confine the central character (Contemporary Artists 968) within close proximity to the others since all the characters have conflicting goals (Baigell 356).

Like his central focus on the woman, Tooker shows her entrapment within the men’s urbanization project through the audience’s perception of the painting. The woman extends her right hand outward, drawing the audience into the conflict, and directly pleads with the men who represent urbanization. Tooker shows the audience her discontent with her hand gesture, defines it with her frown, and extends his social commentary through magic realism. Like Tooker’s traffic director in Highway who attempts to stop the active drivers by extending his hand, the woman does the same toward the Builders’ workers. Both the protagonists extend themselves to seek change and resolve the conflicts, a notion that the audience must look deep to discover. Tooker atypically shows humans’ desire for change to portray the world’s inevitable results.

Little change occurs when the world’s powerful people are apathetic to a minority’s concern, like the environment. The audience learns that the workers in Builders have the most power by the characters’ heights and positions. The man standing behind the woman has little influence because the other men and structure cover his whole body as he stands furthest away from the audience. The woman and three construction workers appear closer in perspective, but these men look down at her since they have a height advantage. Both the builders’ height and nearness to the audience outside the painting represent their power within the painting. While Tooker positions the men closer to the audience, he faces their backs toward the audience and omits some of their facial features to illustrate their apathy to the larger conflict between urbanization and environmental preservation.

Further representing nature’s response to urbanization, Tooker uses overlapping and detail with green plant life to represent the natural space that the building invades and the men seek to dominate. The people and structure have soft linear outlines. In contrast, the few grassy patches sprouting through the dirt in the foreground, and the tree to the far left have definitive, detailed outlines. Tooker obscures the some detail to let the reader notice the similarities between the figures (Garver 10) while he expresses the importance of the plants by their delicateness and detail. He also carefully places them in relation to the scene. Tooker puts the small sprouts in the foreground to represent a minority that seeks attention, like some sprout tips overlapping a worker’s shoe to symbolically initiate dispute against man. The building’s invasion upon the environment initially destroys plant life, but nature returns to fight. Tooker pushes the larger tree to the painting’s side while the structure and men overlap the tree, showing its limited power. This tree and some grass, barely seen through the bottom slit of the structure’s right side, represent the natural world that the builders pave around. Nature still remains, but the structure makes it increasingly harder to survive.

Through Tooker’s political stance in Builders, he shows how architecture destroys its surrounding environment (Contemporary Artists 968) with an isolated example of urbanization. An entire community’s well being may depend on the government’s land use (Levy 2). In the United States, a developer must decide whether the financial benefits outweigh the environmental costs (2). Smaller communities like the one the Builders’ woman occupies have planners who sometimes consider larger scale benefits for society rather than for individuals and the environment (2, 94). The United Nations even acknowledges the global conflicts between the environment and urbanization (7-16); thus Tooker does address one, isolated problem. The woman in Builders urges the men to stop the destroying the environment for urbanization purposes. But the men’s initial descent upon the land show Tooker’s view that urbanization will win the battle.

Tooker’s uses magic realism and his characters, audience, and nature in Builders to show that powerful products of urbanization negatively affect other people and the environment. He instructively teaches the audience to sympathize with the products of the world’s wrongs (Moorman 117). When the construction worker invades your property, are you likely to fight back? Americans who value their property and environmental preservation will revolt against change, but usually fail. Even though the woman pleads with the builders, Tooker shows that she and nature will inevitably lose their freedom. The powerful authority of men and urbanization will ultimately ignore a minority’s struggles and pursue the land that they have already begun to destroy.

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