Subway Sonnet No. 28 Painting

Subway Sonnet No. 28. Oil and paper on canvas. The sides are painted and it is ready to hang. In my new series of paintings, I work to create a visual narrative that is derived from memories of growing up in the projects in NY late 70s and 80s. I clearly visualize the utilitarian canvas of aluminum and stainless steel deployed by city architects and industrial designers of every public resource provided to Brooklyn’s working classes in the form of subway car, public telephone, ATM, elevator, restroom cubicle and the rolling steel cages that secure the neighborhood stores after closing. Mark-making in these paintings emulates the process by which all these metallic surfaces became the backdrop for the graphic history of the neighborhoods as they became adorned with the textural and visual imagery. “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls -(Sounds of Silence, 1964). In this environment the sharpie, self-adhesive sticker, pasted hand-bill and aerosol paint can can quickly communicate and populate an entire neighborhood overnight promoting local punk rock bands and their gigs, political messaging, self-expression and the advertisement of services from 24-hour plumbers to local sex workers. My paintings feel as if they have been created by random collaboration in the same way public telephone booths and trains quickly filled up with stickers and graffiti. The surface is archaeological, stratified with graphic artifacts as some, previously placed, are torn away and others overlaid upon existing iconography. The picture plane is scratched and eroded and scrawled upon. Song lyrics and Shakespearean quotes share the same space with philosophy and street slang. There is rough poetry in the un-painterly rhythm and coarseness of this approach. I have tied together all the imagery and text to imbue each painting with a particular and specific mantra that ranges from “fame” and “success” to “love” and “prosperity”. I pay homage to post-war American art and the neo-expressionists. Icons from the world’s religions and philosophies, pictures torn from art and fashion magazines and references to lyrics from my favorite bands find their way on my canvas. It’s an affirmation. From the cave painters of Western Europe who crawled into dark recesses to leave their ocher hand prints to the graffiti artists who tag their names on subway walls and across the city, it’s the same need to leave your mark that drives street art. Affirmation is also found in mantras, spells and the lyrics of popular music and I can close my eyes in the studio, listening to a favorite track and see the energy of the city in my mind’s eye and that pushes me to paint what I feel and to roughly organize the narrative of the painting to fit a particular theme.