Posts tagged with new york
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Orchid Frenzy at the New York Botanical Garden
Orchids are the original, literal hothouse flower, and they’re headlining their 11th annual exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden. This year’s Orchid Show (through April 22) is a homegrown affair, conceived, designed, and executed by the Garden’s own team rather than outside artisans. Certainly a return to epiphytic roots. Take a look behind the scenes, from the creative exhibition work on display to the Garden’s own onsite “plant factory” that produces the floral cast of thousands on display.
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![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://25.media.tumblr.com/283b6615a4d7712bb1c7246480aab3fd/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o6_r1_1280.jpg)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://25.media.tumblr.com/496475fff8f88e8fcd712cf23973c58e/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o4_1280.png)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://24.media.tumblr.com/ee1c4579be0fabcd00fbb06b51ddd7ea/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://25.media.tumblr.com/88e95ad03dfddb7b3e686201e045610e/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://25.media.tumblr.com/d53601d8ed9525557b635de1fa9c0e6f/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://24.media.tumblr.com/15511278aacea83cff59521df0ec0f92/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
View post 2,822 notes -
The Creators of NYC: Artist and Actor Julio Cotto
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to the final chapter of Creators of NYC.
Julio Cotto
After a long stay in the south honing his craft, Bronx-born artist and actor Julio Cotto recently returned to New York to make a go of it in the art world. Cotto is self-taught; he has illustrated comic books and greeting cards, painted carousel horses, played an Iraqi sniper in Army Wives, and worked as a graphic artist in Greenville, SC. He’s now working on a series of illustrations inspired by encyclopedia pages.I’ve known his work for a decade, but I didn’t meet Cotto until recently, when we spent a day walking around Williamsburg.
You’ve been in NYC for a year now. How has the transition been?
Moving here from clean, friendly, laid-back Charleston would have been much more of a culture shock had I not spent the first several years of my life in the South Bronx. Insane things happened to me this first year back in New York. Roommates, rats, pit bulls, cops and robbers, oh, my! I’ve got stories.View post 252 notes -
Wall Dogs: The Midair Muralists Who Paint New York
It’s 8am in Soho, the thermometer reads just above freezing, and the sky is bleak. Taxis splash down the streets; New Yorkers stride with their heads down, leaping over puddles, carelessly bumping into each other. Everyone wants to get out of the cold, out of the rain, into the warmth.
Ten stories above — on a long, skinny platform hanging from the facade of a building at Canal and Mercer in downtown Manhattan — it’s a different story. Climbers’ ropes secured around their torsos, Jason Coatney and Armando Balmaceda stand in a melange of open paint cans and brushes. These two muralists of Colossal Media, the largest hand-painted advertising company in America, are heavily layered in sweatshirts and raincoats. But in this industry, c’est la vie. Paintbrushes in their fingerless-gloved hands, earbuds in their ears — “I like to start out with Miles Davis in the morning,” Coatney smiles, his breath visible in the frigid air — they begin yet another workday in the sky.
It’s the third morning at this location, and the duo are on track, despite the rain, to complete a 30x18-foot mural — commissioned by Etsy to advertise a holiday pop-up shop — by the next evening’s deadline. Coatney carefully bends down, dipping the tip of his brush into a ruddy orange. “It’s a really weird mix of things that makes an artist like a wall dog,” he says.
Some say the origins of the term is derogatory. “Wall dogs” were the unofficial names of the men who were, almost literally, chained to outdoor facades to hand paint the enormous signs still decorating the faded exteriors of today’s landmarked buildings. But these days, the name is a sign of professional pride.
Before vinyl posters printed and hung by a couple guys and a crane became the norm, this was the way big-city advertising was done. Common practice in the decades before the Great Depression, painting these signs took days, perhaps weeks, of hard labor and skills that took years to hone.
Despite a couple updates (they now use motorized pulley systems to raise the building rigs, instead of pulling them up themselves), Colossal is carrying on the tradition, just as their predecessors did more than a century before. Paul Lindahl and Adrian Moeller cofounded the company nine years ago (a third cofounder tragically passed away in a subway accident) by pooling together their savings, a few thousand dollars, and leasing a large wall on 14th Street and 6th Avenue. “Hanging banners is faster; there are less variables. Everyone just told us to take a hike,” recalls Lindahl. Finally, months later, someone bit –- Rockstar Games, of Grand Theft Auto fame -– and they were so taken with the medium that they commissioned Colossal to paint 30 walls.
Moeller chuckles proudly as he talks about the past. “For the first few jobs, we couldn’t even afford a pounce machine,” the little contraption that burns holes into the life-size sketch they make for each job. They’ll spread this out and rub it with charcoal dust to get a faint outline when they’re on the rig, to help get the proportions right. “So Paul used a thumbtack. You can imagine, that’s a lot of holes to make for a 20x30 foot wall.”
No more thumbtacks. Today, Colossal is a $10 million company, with over 150 walls around the country and 30 wall dogs to fill them. “It takes years and years of practice,” emphasizes Coatney, still on the Etsy rig, who’s been doing this for 15 years. The rain has abated, and he’s added the finishing touches to the “always handpaint” lettering of the Colossal insignia. He pauses, his brush hovering in midair. “There are a lot of talented people waiting to get up here, you know? A lot of talented people.”
View post 2,265 notes -
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://25.media.tumblr.com/21fecb015026f20fb89f71e22b6bcb0f/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o6_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://24.media.tumblr.com/317df6d977c2b5b19cbddb0f04654e19/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o8_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://25.media.tumblr.com/985aa4d3021c0e2a8c451690ac1d334c/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://25.media.tumblr.com/e0caefdd9b23940cb64bc4e94558108d/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o4_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://25.media.tumblr.com/4f20b98168131a933ddb14f88399763d/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://24.media.tumblr.com/4c3455c8ca66ce0527e95f3cc1267b40/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://24.media.tumblr.com/6373fc4f6c3e3a029945bc8db8b17236/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://25.media.tumblr.com/55de7466ad1a349ecb7a1dbaf87e33a2/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o7_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://25.media.tumblr.com/9355aa6c9ddefc19cd045e4b92fd0ea7/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o9_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
Which came first, drawing or tattooing?
I was always drawing and making shit as a kid, but I have very little formal training in art. It might be more fair to say that I have none! Everything I’ve learned about drawing, composition, color theory, et cetera comes from working with really talented and generous tattoo artists over the years.
Stylistically, is there a big difference in mediums for you?
I think of tattooing mostly (but not exclusively) as a craft. An incredibly creative, sustaining and inspiring — but extremely strict — craft. And by that I mean it’s possible and necessary to apply your own creative sensibility to your tattoo work, but you should never sacrifice the fundamentals of good tattooing to accomplish your own, or your clients’, weird artsy goals. Someone has to wear your experiment for the rest of their life.
Has living in New York affected your work as an artist?
I don’t think you could live in New York City and not have your work be affected. On one end of the spectrum, you may be overwhelmingly crippled by the fact that you’ll never ever be as [insert adjective of your choice] as [insert person of your choice]. On the other end, you might be equally as crippled by the heart-wrenching beauty of all that creativity. Most days I aim to wake up somewhere in the middle so that I can actually function.
The tattoo world has come into the limelight in recent years. Is that a double edged sword?
I got into tattooing on the tail end of the pre-internet days, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, it was really different. Tattooing was, is, and always will be fucking awesome regardless of what the current mainstream trends are. It feels a bit wrong for me to talk about tattooing’s past (even it’s most recent past) and future because I’m still dumbstruck that I get to have this job. I just have too much respect for the tattooers who came before me to pretend as if I’m qualified to speak of days past. I feel lucky they even let me in the club.
What’s a normal day for you entail?
Coffee, dog, draw, draw, draw, more coffee, draw, email, emails, bike ride, tattoo, tattoo tattoo, food, more dog, maybe more coffee, draw, paint, write, read … with some eatin’ and lovin’ thrown in the mix.
— Photos and text by Josh Wool](http://25.media.tumblr.com/df8178461e1c87dc4977d25833af00ce/tumblr_mfcnd4rgOp1rrpm57o10_1280.jpg)
The Creators of NYC: Tattoo Artist Virginia Elwood
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Virginia Elwood
Tattoo artist Virginia Elwood has been plying her craft for the last 12 years and has made a name for herself at New York Adorned as one of the top talents in the industry. I first saw her work several years ago, and I bumped into her on the G train in Brooklyn shortly after I arrived in New York. After almost a year of exchanging emails, we finally sat down in her Carrol Gardens home.
When did you figure out that tattoo art could be an actual career?
When I was a little kid, I remember wanting to be either a scientist, a ballerina, or a garbage man. I don’t think I had a definition or reference for “art as a career.” I set out on my own at a really young age and drifted from one random job to the next … a career in fine arts was not a realistic or practical goal at that time. The idea that a person could actually get paid to draw didn’t occur to me until I fell head over heals for tattoos as a teenager in the 90s.
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The Creators of NYC: Leather Craftsmen Billykirk
Josh Wool spent a decade as an executive chef, opening restaurants across the south. But all that changed in 2010, when the carpal tunnel in his hands meant he could no longer work. To keep from going stir crazy, he picked up a camera and found his next calling. Two years, thousands of portraits, and a move to New York later, Wool is documenting the people who inspire him on a daily basis. Welcome to Creators of NYC.
Billykirk
A simple, well-worn leather watch strap was the catalyst for brothers Kirk and Chris Bray to start a business. In the last decade they took an idea and built it into a thriving leather goods company called Billykirk, recently transplanted from LA. Their focus is on craftsmanship and quality, and it shows in their products. I first met the duo at the Pop-Up Flea Market in Chelsea, and they invited me out to their workshop just across the river.
Billykirk is making hard goods meant to stand the test of time, in an age where everything is disposable. What’s your philosophy on that?
Chris Bray: At a certain point you start to think about a product’s worth. Saving money versus an item’s longevity becomes questioned. I think we would all agree that, on the surface, saving money makes sense. However, peel back the onion and one quickly realizes that while you may get that initial satisfaction of saving a buck on a cheap suit or frying pan, that suit or frying pan will inevitably have a short life.
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