Here's a page from my notebook. Art galleries always give me lots of story ideas and painting tips, but I have to jot them down or I forget them.
If I'd had more time, I would've sketched these tiers of the gallery. I love how the people become calligraphic marks, abstracted because you can only see parts of their dark figures.
I'd spent the whole day before cooped up on airplanes, so I took a long walk from the Guggenheim on 89th, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, 73 blocks down Fifth Avenue to 16th, where I met up with my friends Brynn and Chris for a tour of Google (earlier blog post about that here). Here are a few more pictures of those water towers on the skyline that I liked so much.
You could play a fun 'spot the water tower' game in New York. Split a group into teams, give each team a camera, set a time limit, then see how many water towers they could snap in that time (kind of like my Spot-the-Wharf game). Okay, yeah, that's a kind of nerdy idea. But, hey.
I like these pipes you see dotted around; this one looks like a Chinese dragon.
Some of the signs seem a bit strange. I mean, what's a 'Hollow Sidewalk'? Does it have a tunnel underneath? And that 'Siamese Standpipe' with two heads, is that a slightly un-PC reference to conjoined twins?
This lovely building's starting to crumble; the sign above it door reads The New York House and Society of Industry, 1878. I found a short NY Times article about it that says it's a place 'where the poor learned 'plain and fine sewing'.
I just liked the colours and lettering on these signs.
I popped into Pearl Paint and bought some pens and a tin of coloured pencils.
