MADAM TISSAUD'S

Madam Tissaud's is a 5x7 pastel on Pastelbord.


It was probably about this same time of year when I took the photos for this piece. I was walking back to my hotel room after an all-day art show on the grounds of Rockefeller Center. It was dusk, the city lights were beginning to blaze, the rush hour traffic was in full swing. New York does something to the senses.

I suppose I romanticize the city; maybe I wouldn't think it was such a wonderland if I had had a few years to navigate the city subways in the miserable wet winters. We left Long Island when I was a child, to move to Atlanta. But I still remember watching the Thanksgiving Parade from my father's office in the Empire State Building. I remember the city twinkling brilliantly at Christmas time, the fantastic Macy's windows with moving trains and beautiful dolls and snow, all come to life. I remember seeing the steam billow out from the grates on the sidewalks on cold days--no doubt hell. I always wondered how people could just blithely hustle over those terrifying smokey grates, knowing the suffering beneath them.

My Catholic beginnings.