An Artist’s View of the Riches of New York City

I knew no one when I first came to New York, which meant it belonged only to me. Drawing it, I still feel as if I’m taking inventory of an infinite treasure vault.
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I first came to New York when I was twenty-four. I didn’t know anybody, which was scary, but that came with a perk: the city belonged to me alone. I soon discovered that drawing was a useless medium to reproduce its dizzying level of detail. But here’s what I found drawing can do: it can convey the rhythm and texture of New York. It can capture the disorienting, intoxicating experience of stepping out of Grand Central Terminal, or of being in downtown Brooklyn on a dark, hard February day, or of walking through the Lower East Side with dozens of layers of the city’s history visible simultaneously.

Times Square.
In the Guggenheim Museum.
The southern end of Central Park.
Raoul’s, on Prince Street in SoHo.
Scaffolding in lower Manhattan.
Downtown Brooklyn.
Jimmy’s Corner, on West Forty-fourth Street.
Lexington Avenue at East Twenty-third Street.
Rooftops in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Bryant Park and the New York Public Library.
A subway platform in Brooklyn Heights.
Midtown from above.
An entrance to the subway by City Hall.
Underneath the Kosciuszko Bridge, in Queens.
Looking west across the Central Park Reservoir.