"The afternoon has gently passed me by. The evening spreads it's sail across the sky. Waiting for tomorrow, just another day, God bid yesterday good-bye." -The Police
"Corner Bistro" Graphite pencil on paper, 24" x 18", Collection of Stacy and Jacob Raddock
There was something about this composition that gripped me with an irresistible grasp that took me a bit to comprehend. It was my childhood. Needless to say it was unconventional.
I grew up in Queens during the eighties and like so many I wondered and dreamt of what was "over there". My mother was always unabashedly brave and breaking down boundaries; she would take us into the Big Apple. There were museums visits, and afternoons in Central Park. Birthday dinners were lobster dinners at South Street Seaport, and holidays were spent ice skating at Rockefeller Center. There were street musicians playing George Benson style funk jazz, and Break Dancing Crews. Art was everywhere.
I also saw junkies overdosed, and punks in severe withdrawal from heroin addiction. Taking subways was always a serious gamble and coming home from my summer classes at the Art Students' League to my home in Corona almost always meant having to fight. There was beauty, there was brutality. It bizarrely made sense to me.
Though I don't think so much of the above mentioned was at all out of the ordinary for a city kid at that time, I felt I was privy to things other were not; the night time in New York City. I saw it all. There is always something so tense about the coming of the night in the city during the summer months. So much so that I have always noticed a strange silence. It is as if the day has had its time and there is to be a changing of the guard. The streets slowly start to teem with a separate set of activities that can only exist in lower light. It seemed as that was my favorite time of the day, the coming of night.
The word haunting keeps coming up to describe my work. It seems as these echoes from the past have a very loud voice in my present. If I take a moment to think about what has changed since that time in my life, I can't really say much.