Paintings: Subject and Process
The Subject
I often get asked with concern, bordering upon alarm, Tom, why don’t you just go paint something else like maybe a still life or a tree or something? My answer is, well, a tree would be interesting, thank you. Maybe a street tree with a con artist trying to sell it to someone else?
I am kind of stuck in New York. There’s something about the City that just grabs you by the ear like a street corner crazed evangelical. Arriving from California, we stayed at the Hotel Edison in the center of Times Square. A light snow drifted in and out of neon lights that splashed lurid colors on the sidewalk surrounded by long deep shadows so typical of NYC. Guys pulling down hats, smoking cigarettes, women in high heels stepping out of Checker cabs at two in the morning, I thought this was the best place I’d ever seen. It’s all here, like going back in time walking through a film noir movie, Taxi Driver or Midnight Cowboy. A totally lucky time to be an artist and be in New York.
The urban stage is set with characters, big red tour buses, cars, belching carting trucks, ballerinas in sweats skipping the boulevards, Kamikaze single-gear bike messengers lean into crosswalks oblivious to pedestrians. All bathed in the unique light of an island. We do forget NYC is surrounded by water and is indeed an island city. Light crisply sculpts more like a laser blast than the soft bouncing light of California.
Great fun to get lost standing on a street corner drawing and watching. Just be aware of the homeless guy coming out of the shadows gripping a number 2 pencil zooming in on your neck. NYC is a labyrinth-like maze with great beauty surrounded by pitfalls and danger. A painting needs that edge to make a compelling story.
It was surprising that no other painters saw it the way I did, a City on the edge of being reborn. But understandable in the art world as city scenes usually get a bad rap. Art Forum critics are no help. Provincialism! They cry. They would love to cancel City scenes by Georgia O’Keefe, John Sloan, Reginald Marsh, the whole lot of them. Art writers trumpet woke art, conceptual, performance, political art, anything but narrative paintings combining realism and abstraction on canvas. Fortunately art collectors think differently and often just buy what they like.
Time goes by, of course and the city changes. Neighborhoods change. Times Square went from peep shows, lilac colored plastic trash bags mountained up on sidewalks, roving wilding gangs, along with the chaotic energy, the din of thousands of honking yellow taxis. Now it’s 12 story electric waterfalls Jumbotrons and LED Mega Spectaculars bathing crowds of tourists sipping Starbucks and shoving falafels in their pie holes comfortably parked at tables in the middle of Broadway. The relentless river of traffic, the dynamo that was the epicenter of the city, is now totally dammed up.
As luck would have it, there are still many more characters and energetic streets in NYC to paint. For me, I don’t have to think of a theme and go on an angst ridden search like most artists for “the next big thing in the art world”. Just continue down the path of a journalistic approach. Keep your eyes open, record, paint and don’t think about it too much.
The Process
I wander around New York City with a sketchbook or sometimes ride a Segway NineBot e scooter with a vest GoPro camera chasing the fleeting light. If the light looks better two blocks away you can get there in zero seconds.
Some things I look for.
Light that screams between two buildings, a light that sculpts all in its path.
Or long deep shadows created by a late day, low horizon sun. Shadows that appear as thirty foot purple-blue sea creatures shimmering on white streets.
Movement and energetic activity all the urban chaos somehow barely in check from wildly spinning out of control. That’s why nothing came out of the Covid drama. The streets were empty and silent. An empty racetrack, a vacant sports stadium, just a big nothing burger.
Known as a terrible listener, I do overhear people tell stories as everyone has indeed lost all sense of privacy. Nothing is confidential when talking on an iphone in the street .”Left him on 14th street calling out for his stupid dead cat”. Or “What they told me was to just bring a smile and your checkbook. “ “Tell them anything, tell them I stopped being a writer and I’m now working on a shrimp boat in Cambodia.” “Have to hop, new tenant coming in, 40 year old stripper with a black eye, two different check books and a new Porsche with Hawaii plates.”
All overheard one day while standing around a lamppost on 43rd street. Titles serve to anchor and bring a scene home.
Sketch endlessly then snap a few photos for reference. Draw the people over and over then figure the perspective and the way things can be exaggerated to tell the story. Paint with wild abandon with a full palette over the pencil line drawing. That part of the process, figuring out the form is left in the final piece.
A couple who owned a few of my pieces was going on vacation. The housekeeper asked them what should I do? They said to just find something and walked out. And she did. She got a bottle of White Out and proceeded to cover up all the pencil lines on the paintings.
