Rendering №2

The article “The Starving Artist atMoMA’s Doors” was published on October 5, 2012 in NY Times. It discusses that 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. The author, Corey Kilgannon, notices Mark Nilsson, 25, who for $50, he will depict you in a bold brushwork style, a unique, moody interpretation in acrylics on a stiff, nine-inch-square bit of paper. It is mentioned that people always talk about starving artists who die without ever seeing their work ascend to the walls of places like the Modern. Well, here is Mr. Nilsson, right outside its doors, 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. Moreover, many days, Mr. Nilsson, who has been working outside the museum since the summer of 2011, goes without a single taker.

Speaking about the artist the only problem of him is having to wait for work. The correspondent points out that people consider his works as great art but they do not recognize how fast those things are made. It is necessary to mention 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 the situation 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. It is an open secret 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. Ms. Moody 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.

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 conclusion the author gives Nilsson’s former classmate’s quote: “You’re the only one of us I know who’s making a living painting’. In my opinion, art is a mandatory part of every person’s life. But for Mr. Nilsson art is more much bigger because his art is the life. I admire people who can draw because I cannot.