New York
To create a sense of place, a certain specificity that captures and grounds us firmly within a world is one thing; to be subtly influenced by the actual world in which one is entrenched is another.
What makes one a "New York" artist? New York itself is a cosmopolitan city, viewed by outsiders as the quintessential American city and yet so unlike any other city. Mention New York and you get an immediate visual response mixing the romantic notions of a Woody Allen movie with the grime and cynicism of a Weegee photograph.
A New Yorker can be the recent immigrant from almost any country, an emigrant of 20 years from any state or a third generation native born. New York symbolizes fantasies of lives unlived but for me it is the reality of home.
It is a walking city, un-American in its self-reliance and its tentative acceptance of the car rather than a love affair with it. We have our own convoluted subterranean system which becomes an internal connection, a maze that unites.
The city is populated but so are the streets, with the sometimes steady, sometimes intermittent flow of bodies pulsing, walking with determination as time is not to be wasted and there is always somewhere to go. It is a city that invites but insists on being joined, as well. It has its own etiquette, a necessity for a hugely populated walking city. But the act of viewing while walking, rather than driving, is an experience greatly different in quality and degree of concentration. As a car sweeps down a street, a quick, blurred impression consistent with the pace of the city but void of its intensity, is all that is retained. To walk is to thrust oneself into the melee rather than maintain the distance of a casual observer.
Though walking with purpose, I have always instinctively examined my surroundings. Details of the city became part of my early consciousness; ordinary games of jumping on the pavement held a menacing penalty if even a toe hit "the cracks". These spaces between the slabs of concrete contained within them such bad luck that stepping on them would alter one's life forever. Even now, I walk the streets with one eye surreptitiously focused on the sidewalk. The sounds around become part of this detail. I can feel the streets, I can gauge the traffic, I know when someone's eyes are upon me.
The spaces are always measurements in distances, where I am the center. I "read" the subtleties of the city, a suspicious ally, ever attune to the nuances, taking in all and sorting simultaneously into priorities of importance. A whole being the sum of its parts yet seeing the parts separately, deeply, with clarity and precision, dissecting, analyzing, keeping and discarding.
The rhythms of the city echo in the buildings; the cacophony
of sound, often irritating, blend with the visual highs and lows. The hodgepodge
of architectural styles and generations, constrained by the occasional attempts
of city planners, highlight the diversity of the surrounding cultures. What
could be painful collision coexists side by side, learning to adjust and
find its own comfort level, changing the identity of the community into
one of less homogeneity. To create a sense of place, a certain specificity that captures and grounds us firmly within a world is one thing; to be subtly influenced by the actual world in which one is entrenched is another.
What makes one a "New York" artist? New York itself is a cosmopolitan city, viewed by outsiders as the quintessential American city and yet so unlike any other city. Mention New York and you get an immediate visual response mixing the romantic notions of a Woody Allen movie with the grime and cynicism of a Weegee photograph.
A New Yorker can be the recent immigrant from almost any country, an emigrant of 20 years from any state or a third generation native born. New York symbolizes fantasies of lives unlived but for me it is the reality of home.
It is a walking city, un-American in its self-reliance and its tentative acceptance of the car rather than a love affair with it. We have our own convoluted subterranean system which becomes an internal connection, a maze that unites.
The city is populated but so are the streets, with the sometimes steady, sometimes intermittent flow of bodies pulsing, walking with determination as time is not to be wasted and there is always somewhere to go. It is a city that invites but insists on being joined, as well. It has its own etiquette, a necessity for a hugely populated walking city. But the act of viewing while walking, rather than driving, is an experience greatly different in quality and degree of concentration. As a car sweeps down a street, a quick, blurred impression consistent with the pace of the city but void of its intensity, is all that is retained. To walk is to thrust oneself into the melee rather than maintain the distance of a casual observer.
Though walking with purpose, I have always instinctively examined my surroundings. Details of the city became part of my early consciousness; ordinary games of jumping on the pavement held a menacing penalty if even a toe hit "the cracks". These spaces between the slabs of concrete contained within them such bad luck that stepping on them would alter one's life forever. Even now, I walk the streets with one eye surreptitiously focused on the sidewalk. The sounds around become part of this detail. I can feel the streets, I can gauge the traffic, I know when someone's eyes are upon me.
The spaces are always measurements in distances, where I am the center. I "read" the subtleties of the city, a suspicious ally, ever attune to the nuances, taking in all and sorting simultaneously into priorities of importance. A whole being the sum of its parts yet seeing the parts separately, deeply, with clarity and precision, dissecting, analyzing, keeping and discarding.
The neighborhood settles into what it has become. The latest addition of architecture nestles between older neighbors and eventually is accepted and woven into the fabric as is each new wave of change of human inhabitants.
The streets are paved with brick, with cobblestones, with fading asphalt revealing traces of trolley rails. The slate sidewalks bulge and crack into jagged pieces, turn to indiscriminately patched cement. I exit my house and look at the isolated tree in front of my building, a tree that exists only in its relationship to every other object, neither more nor less important than the building stoop it shades. It becomes merely one more element consumed into a forever mutating and evolving situation. The 19th century factory across the street stares down upon me in its latest incarnation as artists' lofts. I turn the corner and find myself suddenly confronting the waterfront.
I am drawn to this unrelenting waterfront; the water continually asserts itself in a city dealing with the contradiction of the urban and the wild, threatened by the constant presence of an expanse of sea. Having grown up by the ocean, I learned to look outward away from the country and continent. Now by the harbor, I feel connected to the city through viewing the convergence of so many of its islands, though still alienated from the mainland. This Brooklyn waterfront maintains only a semblance of its former self but the haunting wails of the ships' horns at night still remind me of the possibilities I envisioned as a child of another world.
I continue my walk past elegant townhouses overlooking piers that fade into warehouses long abandoned and reborn. Even among the rows of houses, each one bears a distinctive quality, one with filigree gates, another with painted stone, another with an intricately carved front door.
The famous skyline sits like a movie backdrop before me as I approach the Brooklyn Bridge. I have crossed this bridge hundreds of times and yet I still cannot control the swelling of awe every time I walk the same path, an embarrassingly naïve response for this jaded New Yorker.
Perhaps it is why I feel more comfortable in the closed cavernous streets of lower Manhattan where a 20th century facade peels into a 19th century one; grotesques adorned facades stare uncomfortably at facades of pure windows. The claustrophobic spaces of my work resonate with this landlocked feeling. The Beaux Arts beauties, crowned by the Woolworth building, have dared me to reinvent them in a way that is more mysterious and intriguing.
I grew up among the fragmentation, viewing the world as a pastiche of disparate elements and juxtaposition of opposing textures. New York is a city of an amalgam of styles and materials, grayed down to work as a whole.
I, too, have created cities, pieced together here and there with pieces of cities from here and there. My imagined worlds are no different from the one familiar to me; I am constantly re-creating them as New York re-creates itself.
It is the geography of my youth forever imprinted on my worldview. I carry New York with me, other cities are not there merely to suffer the comparison but for a subconscious desire to seek out the similarities.
Location may change but I am drawn to the same disparities, the same humanizing fabrications in the structures confronted on a daily basis, the same spaces and sense of space. It is my inescapable landscape, the underlying influences in my work. Wherever my wanderings lead me, I am and always will be a New York artist.
maddrose@hotmail.com
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