The article published on the website of the newspaper “The New York Times” on October 5, 2012 is headlined “The Starving Artist at MoMA’s Doors”. The article reports at length that it is hard to make a trip to the Museum of Modern Art without noticing, just outside the entrance on West 53rd Street, the lean, fresh-faced young man with paint-caked clothes standing next to his paint-caked table. It’s an open secret that this person is Mark Nilsson, 25, at his sidewalk portrait booth who can depict you for 50 dollars in a bold brushwork style, a unique, moody interpretation in acrylics on a stiff, nine-inch-square bit of paper.
There is every reason to believe that people always talk about starving artists who die without ever seeing their work ascend to the walls of places like the Modern. So there is every likelihood that Mr. Nilsson, right outside its doors, is in the prime of his starving period — starving for paying customers, anyway, ones willing to sit still for an hour for a likeness that is far from one of those sugary caricatures you get in Times Square. It’s an open secret that many days, Mr. Nilsson, who has been working outside the museum since the summer of 2011, goes without a single taker. It was revealed that for the past few weeks, a construction crew has forced him to a less opportune location, across the street from the museum’s entrance, where there seem to be fewer of the foreign tourists who make up the bulk of his clientele.
Analyzing this situation it is necessary to mention that Mr. Nilsson, who grew up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and studied painting at the State University of New York at Purchase, is a common sight inside the museum, too, where he uses the bathroom and studies the Matisses and Cezannes on the fifth floor. On Wednesday afternoon, he left his table unattended to check out several Cezanne landscapes and still lifes. There is general feeling to believe that the well-appointed museumgoers, mostly tourists, seemed tickled to see the gangly artist in the paint-hardened jeans and splotchy shirt speaking passionately about the paintings. They took snapshots of the real-live artist. Besides, it is necessary to point out that Ellen Moody, 27, a museum conservator, admired Mr. Nilsson’s work space, a lightweight $30 card table now laden with thick layers of paint — really a huge palette that itself is a colorful curiosity to passers-by.
In resolute terms the author of the article makes it clear that there was a friend teaching art in Taiwan who urged Mr. Nilsson to join him, and the couple from the Napa Valley who offered to fly him out for a few weeks to paint portraits, and the studio downtown that said it wanted to commission him to paint subjects it chose. In the conclusion the author gives Mr. Nilsson’s former college classmate opinion on his creativity: “You’re the only one of us I know who’s making a living painting”. As for me, I admire such people as Mr. Nilsson who put their soul into their work. Mr. Nilsson is a real artist who lives his life for Art and shares it with us with the help of his works.
Excellent!
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