2009 New York
Returning to New York for two months in 2009 I made a pilgrimage to Edward Hopper’s studio in Washington square, home to John Dos Passos and other chroniclers of this breathtaking city that I always feel so sad to leave. Like leaving a party that’s in full swing, never easy. I made several trips back to Coney Island to chronicle its changes from seaside fairground to commercial 21st Century playground. I also wanted to finish the painting I had begun four years earlier. Sun-worshippers and devotees of the famous Nathan’s hotdogs abound and all this desire leaves me wanting more, leaves me hungry.
In complete antithesis to all this physical hunger, one Palm Sunday the music from a Harlem church draws me in. I can never resist drawing in Harlem; a place of raw music and politics that has seen so much. Out on the streets there are many more white faces than I remember from my previous visits. I’m standing outside the Greater Central Baptist Church and from within the preacher’s voice is so powerful as he sings. The blues, the soul music that inspires much of my work is alive here and it’s a privilege to be here even as an outsider.
I venture in taking a seat high up and the preacher talks of being ‘tied’ ( ‘Tied!’) and being ‘loose’( ‘Loose!’) , emphasising the words again and again with mounting passion until he drives the words into us. I think of the slave trade that built Wall Street and the deeply moving African Burial Ground we had seen in Lower Manhattan.
I spend my last three days in New York standing by the Hudson being tied unsuccessfully to my attempt to draw the entire vista of Manhattan from New Jersey, with all its glorious giant man-made gorges and swooping peaks. I imagine how the whole scene would have looked four hundred years before, my mind full of the thoughts of the first settlers to New Amsterdam and the Native Americans camped where I stood. On the third day my hand and mind loosens enough to draw with conviction and total submersion - real time out of mind.
In those three frustrating days as I stood and looked across the Hudson at Manhattan I was mentally preparing to leave the city that I love, loosening the ties that bind me to New York so that one day I might pick them up again. I had been tied and now I was set loose.
