"This is the train to 33rd Street."
Insider #77 with scenes from the week in NYC
Dear Insider,
The New York City subway does not tell you to mind the gap. It cannot be bothered with such frivolities. It has a lot going on.
In today’s Insider post, final impressions from this trip, and an update on the next Insider Hangout.
The SneakyArt (Insider) Post is written for paying subscribers of SneakyArt to offer a behind-the-scenes look at my work as an independent artist, writer, and podcaster.
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When the doors close, they sometimes re-open for no reason. An attendant jigs the control panel and fiddles with an ancient switchboard. To get moving, the train steps backwards, releases a loud harrumph, then slowly chugs forward. It is not a steam engine, but it could be.
Along the way it loses power, then regains it. It slows and sometimes even stops in the pitch dark. Nobody looks up from their screens, so I expect this is normal behaviour. It shakes from side to side on old tracks that are the home of New York’s finest rodents. When it approaches the next stop, it jerks between deceleration and acceleration, as if confused and lost, before winding down. Then a final jerk that always manages to catch you off-guard.
The doors open, unaligned with the platform, and you skip off.
I visited the Museum of Modern Art with
this week. My first stop was the gift shop, to look at the books on art and the city, and imagine the space that my future book might occupy (fingers crossed).In between the popular tourist purchases, I found the late Jason Polan’s Every Person in New York. Jason’s work has been a big inspiration in my life. Watching his Instagram feed encouraged me to capture public life, and permitted me to make “ugly drawings”. I dreamed of running into him in New York one day, both of us holding up our sketchbooks, sizing each other up. A sketcher’s stand-off? His premature death was a shock.
Browsing the children’s section, I found a delightful illustrated book called What Degas Saw. I flipped to a random page and found an immediate connection.
We are made to look at each other, don’t you think?
Walking through MoMA was educational in many ways. I thought about the paintings big and small, and how size and framing affected their subject matter. I thought about the people who came in to look at the art, and those who were simply visiting a must-see tourist destination. I thought about how MoMA catered to both audiences.
These are my main takeaways: