Buildings and Art

[avram]

Getting out of the subway at Union Square today and heading towards my bank (to make a deposit, woo-hoo!), I saw a man selling prints and sketching. He was leaning against a lamppost and gazing off to the north, and I knew instantly what building he was sketching, because I’m fascinated by it as well. It’s on the northeast corner of Broadway and 18th Street; that’s it on the left. “That dark one, right?” I asked. I was right. We chatted about it for a while, about the details, the variously-shaped windows, how it’s the exact color of an ivory black wash.

His name is Tom Matt, and he makes amazing paintings on newspaper and sells prints (for more than I can afford, or I’d buy some). (Hey, Meem — his bio says he’s studied at the Lyme Academy of Fine Art, Old Lyme, Connecticut.) I feel inspired.

New York has such beautiful buildings. It’s odd — when I was in college I was a fan of the Bauhaus school of functional design, all that form-follows-function, plain and simple stuff. That movement was a reaction against the very stuff I like so much now. I still like simple design for tools, though. I see no problem with having different aesthetics for tools and buildings.

I did some reading about creative blocks (browsing through a book in A.I. Friedman to kill a few minutes before meeting Kevin at Cosmic Comics), and I suspect strongly that not having space to really work is, well, getting in the way of doing any serious work. Time to start kicking Chris’s butt to get her stuff out of my place. Also time to start getting rid of my stuff.

If I’m correctly remembering an article in the South of the Navy Yards Artists News, on the third Thursday of each month a bunch of Brooklyn artists meet at A Table from 9-11 AM for breakfast. I’d like to show up, but that would require waking up at around 8, and I just don’t know if that’s gonna happen.

Comments

[aiglet.livejournal.com]

I passed a *beautiful* building yesterday down in the teens on ... Park, maybe? I forgot how far over we'd gotten at that point. I just looked up and here was all this really nice tiling on the front of some random building.

I think that's one of the really nifty things about NYC - all the random neat stuff that's just sitting there waiting for someone to notice it. I tend to find modern buildings a little too soul-less and, well, obvious for my tastes.