Cityscape Artist Alan Streets Captures NYC

Alan Streets cannot remember whether he is 32 or 33 years old. He grew up in the suburbs of London and has a thick working-class English accent. He is a slender, nervous man with stooped shoulders and glasses. His blue, hooded parka is speckled with paint.

For the last two years Alan has painted cityscapes on the streets of New York, and he describes it as hard work. "I feel sometimes like a builder. I get up at 6, get to work at 8, paint till it gets dark. It becomes methodical. But it's still good fun and interesting." It is also physically demanding. "I wouldn't be able to do this job if I was still drinking and smoking. Mentally, I wouldn't be able to stand being watched. It took a long time to get used to. When I started, it was nervewracking."

We were standing on the corner of 7th Ave. and 23rd St., and as we talked a young man with a soul patch stopped to flip through Alan's paintings: "Hey, I like your stuff. I'm an artist, you know. I'm a student at the School of Visual Arts. Yeah, I'm all over the city. I'll probably see you around." The young man walked away and another man approached. He looked at the canvas on the easel and said that the colors were all wrong in the bottom section. Alan politely pointed out that the painting was not finished. "Well, listen, if you want a cup of coffee or something, I live down the block."

Alan said that he is not bothered by the people who stop to chat. He also has to sell his work and some of the talkers end up buying. Nonetheless, it can be difficult painting in public: "The hardest thing is you have to be prepared to get into physical confrontations. People pick fights. Just crazy people. They try to intimidate me. But I don't want to exaggerate. I've only had six situations, which is not bad for 600 days of doing this." Alan added that he feels much safer painting in the Bronx than in the big English cities: "Manchester is much more dangerous than here. In Manchester people get drunk when it gets dark. You take your life in your hands."

In school Alan studied English literature and art. Bored by Shakespeare, he was a dismal student of literature, but he was good at art: "Graffiti is my main influence. I've been interested in graffiti since I was 15, since I saw a film called Style Wars. I thought, that's what I want to do." Alan went on to art college, but after four months he dropped out and moved to New York. Having little money, he painted on cardboard and tried to sell his work in Washington Square Park. "My old stuff was all imaginary and abstract. Destructive imagery, anti-society, anti-cops."

Forced back to England a few years later, Alan began a long association with a London gallery but it left him drained and wasted. "We work for them instead of them working for us. I'm not saying all galleries are bad. That's my experience. The gallery encouraged me down my negative way. They didn't care if I ended up in a mental hospital as long as their walls looked good." Alan finally left his gallery and returned to the States two years ago: "A lot of people like my family said I could never succeed in New York. But I had a dream."

I asked Alan why he started painting street scenes: "It was a personal change, but it was also due to survival. When I came back to New York I had all my destructive, anti-society paintings." But he could not sell them. "It started because I needed food. Now it's like positive as opposed to 10 years of painting negative imagery. I think to paint something should make people happy, smile, not antagonize people."

Alan said he wants to make a painting of every area in New York, in every borough. I asked him what he finds unusual about working in the city and he said that it is surprisingly easy to blend in and go unnoticed. "One time a bloke stole a bicycle just two feet away from me. I asked him what he was doing and he said, 'Is this your bike?' So he took it. One time I overheard a conversation between two women and the one woman told her friend that she cleaned the toilet with her husband's toothbrush. Then she put the toothbrush back in the holder. That's just the sort of conversations people have."

Alan Streets' work can be seen online at [www.alanstreets.com](http://www.alanstreets.com).