A few images from my recent trip to New York.

Sketches of people at an ice skating rink in downtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park.

Nice Scarf Dude

I did see a great window display for Hermes on Madison Ave (a store that looked so prohibitively exclusive and not aimed at me and my t-shirt and jeans wearing scrubbiness that I didn’t even care to walk inside) by the artist Aga Ousseinov.

What a great city. I will be back, I will live there….It’s a humbling place. I come away in awe but also accutely aware of my smallness. Just another person not to far off of the average bell curve. There is comfort in that.

On the bus down to New York I sat next to this man, Kader. He was sleeping and had an interesting face so naturally I drew him. When he woke suddenly I quickly put my sketch down but then realized that I didn’t particularly want to hide the fact I was drawing him. We hadn’t spoken for the entirety of the trip and I had already exhausted conversation with the people in the seats (we talked of Naples and Oranges) next to me, so I simply said “Hey I drew you, see..” and then showed him the sketch. He was favourable to his likeness and had a kindness to his demeanor so we started talking of work and life and god and women. He had grown up in Algeria and then moved all over the world. While in Paris he met an American woman, they married and came out to Pittsburgh. At the time (11 years ago) he spoke no English and when he came here - although trained as an accountant in Europe and very bright - his options for work were limited, so in his late 30’s he began working in gas stations, making pizza dough, and doing whatever odd jobs he could find. He had wisdom and he had presence and he appreciated life for what it was. At least in our conversation he presented his philosophy of focusing on what one is doing while they are doing it, embracing each job for all it’s worth and each city and place for their value as well. He referred to God frequently, often with a quotation. I didn’t get the impression that these were statements from a book or dogma, but from lessons and truths that had been garnered through life.

I’m in New York for the weekend and stumbled across this store.  Evolution, For many hundreds to thousands of dollars you can purchase 220 million year old fossils of lizards, bugs, squirmy things, and wingy things.  I love this place.

I also discovered the Elizabeth Street Gallery, original and replica architectural ornmanentia (what is that word), ancient safes, shooting gallery mechanisms, hitching posts, architectural facades, statuary and everything else you can rarely get close to these days.   I talked to the owner Allan who along with selling the originals (I believe) has some of the work duplicated and then refitted for other purposes.  The environment was a dimly lit open studio filled (but not packed) with the original and replica items.  Most of them I believe were originals as I was given a brief tour where we talked about what he sells.   In the middle of the space sitting on a low table was a 19th century catalogue from a French fixture company.  Hundreds, thousands of engraved drawings were in this book.  I am grateful to the Allan and his staff who intially hesitated to open the book as the pages were very thin and fragile but then flipped through a couple of the images letting me look through the work and taking their time to talk to me about what they do.  Sometimes I think I expect their to be an attitude associated with such luxury, probably because there usually is.  As I’ve been working in the Jewelry field my own knowledge base has been rapidly expanding on techiques of fabrication and construction.  I think that if I had gone in here a couple of years ago I would have only had an aesthetic point of view to begin from and I would have been limited in my ability to discover more.  It was a great feeling to actually talk about and discuss the techniques in use and to some extent imagine myself doing the work rather than ‘just’ drawing the work.  The world opens more and more…