Three weeks in New York: 4. Coney Island

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Pier, Coney Island, oil on card, 15 x 18 cm   AVAILABLE   

I got the trains down to Coney Island, an exhausting experience, as it seems extremely easy for me to to take the wrong train on New York's subway system.

The painting there went well, the day warm and gilded with sunshine, and that warm melancholy you feel you feel on such days when it is nice and there's nothing to fight for.

Coney Island seemed less tragic this time than I remember  two years ago

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New York III: Coney Island

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 Yachts, Coney Island, N.Y., 15.5 x 11.5 cm   SOLD

I traveled down to see the charms of Coney Island: here described in Tom Waits', Coney Island Baby:

 Every night she comes
To take me out to dreamland
When I'm with her, I'm the richest
Man in the town

I also think of songs by Lou Reeds: Coney Island Baby , and the Velvet Underground's,  Coney Island Steeplechase, which, at a rockier pace takes a not dissimilar angle:

Would you like to go on the Coney Island Steeple
Go and have a good time
We'll take the subway right down to King's Highway
Gonna have a good time
If it's all right it would be so nice
If you come and go with me
The roller-coaster you and me

But the Coney Island I found more interesting was the sense of ruin and only a half kilometre from the newish boardwalk, where elderly Russians perambulate. Tom Waitsian territory indeed, of bust up car repair years, pawnshops and broken down tenements. I painted to a backdrop of police sirens.

Blocks, Coney Island, N.Y., oil on card, 14 x 11 cm  - available








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