Artists sketch New York for different and sundry reasons. Some prefer the calm of being an intent observer. Some feel closer to the real city. Others attempt to capture a moment in time. Drawing is not the same as photographing. The former is interpretative; the latter is representational (or the other way around, too).
London-based Lucinda Rogers interprets and represents NYC and here she reports on why she does. And what fills her impressive new book of drawings, Lucinda Rogers New York.
What is the best part of drawing New York City?
The beauty inspires me; the combination of strong colors all around (red-brown and grey-blue for buildings, blue for the sky, signs red, cabs yellow, green subway ironwork and trees, black for night and water tanks); the enveloping feeling of Manhattan; the way you can see so far into the distance; the sun shining on the tops of tall buildings when you’re down below in the shadow. Seeing something to draw everywhere.
How long have you traversed NYC to find your subjects?
I’ve been going there regularly to draw since 1990 and, at the start, walked around different areas one by one. Some subjects I saw by chance while on the way somewhere else. Or I may go to a neighborhood on purpose to look for a subject. For example, Orchard Street, knowing it a bit in the 90s I went back in 2002 to see whether things were still the same and report on it. In 2018 I went to look for any remaining meat packing companies in the meat district and drew one from the High Line.
What part of town is the most interesting to draw? Why?
For a long time, I always returned to Canal Street; it’s the combination of human activity and buildings and being on the edge of different neighbourhoods. It used to be full of sellers on the street and plastics stores. The heavy traffic and giant trucks never put me off. I like it all the way along: the big solid buildings around Canal and Sixth Avenue, the edge of SoHo, the part of Broadway going south from Canal, Lafayette Street, Chinatown. The art store Pearl Paint was also on Canal Street, where I went regularly.
The book of drawings is more than a sketchbook, it has a documentary quality. What is your intent for the book and an entity or object?
Each drawing was done at a particular moment for its own reasons, but by putting the collection into a book that spans 30 years, my intent was to show aspects of New York over a period of time, to enable you to revisit parts of the city through the drawings, like time travel. They are mostly large – about 30 inches on the longer side is typical – and can take up to eight hours to draw, sitting in one place and not using photographs. I do not call them sketches, apart from my first short visit in 1988 when I drew in pencil in a very small student sketchbook.
[NB a reproduction of that sketchbook was published this year by Dashwood Books]
Have you ever been harassed while drawing people?
No, I find it’s the opposite! Drawing in the street is a form of communication that makes the big city feel friendly because most people are open to art, they readily accept drawing as a normal thing to be doing, along with everything else. The people whose actual portraits I have drawn were willing and often helped by standing still for a while. Sometimes people look out for me while I’m there, thinking the same, that I may be harassed.
There are a few artists who have drawn NYC and published what they’ve done (e,g, Joel Holland on storefronts, Jason Polan on people). Where do you see yourself as filling the gap?
Doing these drawings has been my own preoccupation, and I haven’t tried to fill a kind of gap, but I guess my drawings are more about the architecture, with wider-angle views of the streets than those two. The scope of the book is similar to that of street photography (I greatly admire many of those photographers, such as Robert Frank and Berenice Abbot), but I use the completely different medium of drawing, which has different results.
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