When I lived in New York, the city was revamping Bryant Park, the space behind the main New York Public Library building on 5th Avenue near 42nd street.  The park was fenced off for a long time. The scene I recorded below in the photograph was probably early morning on a wintry Sunday. When newsstands are closed, they exhibit their own personalities. When customers are browsing, they add to the composition, but then composition becomes the relationship between the people and the newsstand.

Today’s watercolor experiment:

Although I like newsstands in and of themselves, I am sure that the early morning sun glancing on the bare trees had a lot to do with my inclination to take the picture (presented below).

Bryant Park Newsstand – Reference Photo

The red globes announcing the stairs leading down to the subway seem to hearken to another era, as does the lettering of newspaper sign. Some subway steps are crowned by red globes and some by green globes. One of my theories was that the red ones indicate an exit and the green, an entrance. I seem to remember an inconsistency in this theory when I was using the subway, so I don’t remember if my theory was correct.

Here is my ink sketch of the newsstand near the corner of 42nd Street and 6th Avenue.

Ink Sketch: Bryant Park Newsstand

One of the tricky parts was depicting the lighting on the trees. I tried to form the contour of the trees facing eastern light, by shading with cross hatching. I was less than successful with this. [Note to self – more practice forming contours with cross-hatched ink lines.]

The background buildings also posed a problem. One can see in the photo that within the mass of the darker buildings, there are bright reflections from the windows. Instead of performing the painstaking work of painting around the windows, leaving them white or applying frisket to preserve the white space, I opted to wash the building areas with color and dot-in the windows with white ink. I also used white ink to separate the trees from the background.

Bryant Park Newsstand – 6th Ave and 42nd St, NYC (1991)
4″x6″ 140# Mixed Media Paper

My choice of Payne’s gray to represent the bluish tint of the buildings didn’t work to convey the sense of the original photograph. However, I now consider my watercolor to represent a nighttime view of the Bryant Park Newsstand.

Below is an image for readers interested in another great newsstand of the past (originally posted almost exactly one year ago):

News Stand NYC – 46th and Lex
8″x10″ Color Photograph