queen

I took the number 7 train one stop into Queens, got off at Vernon Boulevard-Jackson Avenue and walked up Vernon Boulevard through a light drizzle to attend the opening of an exhibit by friend and artisté Sharon Florin at the Art-O-Mat gallery. She recently joined 7-Year Old Daughter and me for an afternoon at MoMA. It seems every time I see her it’s in conjunction with an art exhibit. You want to keep people like that in your life. They’ll help prevent you from becoming dull.

The exhibit is a series of paintings of Long Island City, where her studio is located. All of her paintings are architecture-centric. Ironically (or, perhaps not!) many of the beautiful old structures in Long Island City that she painted have since been torn down and replaced with something less dignified. Architecture preservationists are begging her to refrain from executing any more paintings of the neighborhood before it completely vanishes.

Actually, that’s not true. That’s a joke.

Here are a two of my favorites. This is the tile mosaic of the Vernon Boulevard-Jackson Avenue subway stop.

And this is the Queensborough Bridge reflected in a skyscraper. No, that's not a photograph. It's oil on canvas.


Here’s her website. Her paintings of Manhattan make me want to live there. Again.