After the recent Richard May piece, another fabulous interview/gallery with an illustrator/artist over at The Morning News - this time Wiltold Riedel, and his sketches made whilst on the New York subway. Reminds me of rodcorp's fabulous doodles in collaboration with London Underground. The Morning News interview includes this really interesting aside on Riedel's process:
"Many of my drawings in general start with little clusters of information; one could call them information ‘seeds.’ I place them on a page and then let the drawing grow from them and around them. Some seeds are planted on the subway; some drawings are finished on the train. I can sometimes pick up a little element on the platform and then transform it into a series of pages while the subway is in motion. Sometimes the seeds are little snippets of conversations I hear on the train or maybe elements of advertisements or poetry in motion. They can also be design elements of someone’s clothing or just the strokes of the pen against the page caused by a rocking motion of the train. The drawings take a certain time to be completed and one drawing can take several rides on a train to find its final form."
Also, these great lines about New York, and the city itself:
"New York exists as many times as there are New Yorkers. We just sometimes happen to ride the same train or do other exciting things in the same location, at the same time. It might be a very naïve and romantic way of seeing the city, but I think it is just multi-faceted enough to give each and every one of us a very unique version of what we just happen to call New York. So what interests me about the people on the subway might be just that, the idea that their New York is a completely different one than mine, but that we still share the city and that $2 ride ... I think that much of the magic of New York is born from the interactions and intersections of the different points of view brought to the city. If every New Yorker were just a passive observer, a spectator, then there would be no New York ... It appears as though the city listens to all the possible dreams and expectations and then includes each of the mosaic pieces into its growing bigger picture. Most New Yorkers carry rich life stories with them, which might help them be more open to the stories of others. This makes New York a much more compassionate and inspiring place than most outsiders would ever dare to imagine."
