In this city of eight million-plus people, there are certain rules by which we must abide in order to preserve our sanity. Take the subway for instance, those mobile zoos of human exhibition. The unofficial MTA code of conduct states that one must not maintain unnecessary eye contact (lest you unwittingly imply you’re in need of a new dance partner); one must not peruse another passenger’s reading material, even if it features naked people; one must not graze elbows or any other body parts; and one must not converse with other riders (particularly not about their aforementioned lurid reading material). But one man has found a way to quietly connect with his fellow New Yorkers, bypassing convention without breaking any rules.
Cully Long is a theater set designer by day and a subway sketch artist by night. With his moleskine sketchbook and ballpoint pen, 34-year-old Long boards the A Train at 59th Street and settles in for an interrupted ride up to 125th.
Along the way, he draws whoever is seated near him. He’s not choosy, so Long’s sketches reveal a social equality present on the subway, despite its absence in the greater city. “Everybody in NYC, from the mayor down to the homeless, rides the train,” says Long, “So if you’re looking at these people, I think you can’t help but wonder about everybody else’s life … who these people are, where they’re going, why they’re wearing that particular thing.”
There is a paradox implicit in Long’s work between the traditionally intimate act of drawing a subject and the fact that his subjects are strangers on a train. Long is a voyeur: While riders sit armed with iPods or sometimes asleep, he privately observes, covertly getting to know them. “I’ve never once spoken in any way to anyone that I’ve drawn,” Long explains, “People just get too insular on the subway and they don’t really pay attention to what’s happening.”
His work evokes that haunting feeling of loneliness in crowds. The majority of Long’s sketches are of isolated individuals, candid moments of oblivion or reflection. When he does draw multiple figures, they are often unrelated, either unaware of the other’s presence or just indifferent to the crush of humanity around them.
And somehow this isolation feels more natural than direct interaction. Though the formal signs of an artistic education are present in Long’s drawings (he has a degree in illustration from the School of Visual Arts), they also possess a casual, unstilted quality—something lacking in today’s high tech world of super polished imagery. We live in a state of immediacy, where fleeting moments can quickly be captured with a camera phone and disseminated online. But Long says his unstaged portraits are more personal than a snapshot, “I can look back on my subject and remember very specific details about how they were moving, whether they were nervous … but I don’t think I could remember that if I had only observed them for a brief second through a camera lens.” In some ways, Long is old-fashioned—managing to slow the information age, if only for a moment, before he posts his sketches to his blog.
Cully Long is a theater set designer by day and a subway sketch artist by night. With his moleskine sketchbook and ballpoint pen, 34-year-old Long boards the A Train at 59th Street and settles in for an interrupted ride up to 125th.
Along the way, he draws whoever is seated near him. He’s not choosy, so Long’s sketches reveal a social equality present on the subway, despite its absence in the greater city. “Everybody in NYC, from the mayor down to the homeless, rides the train,” says Long, “So if you’re looking at these people, I think you can’t help but wonder about everybody else’s life … who these people are, where they’re going, why they’re wearing that particular thing.”
There is a paradox implicit in Long’s work between the traditionally intimate act of drawing a subject and the fact that his subjects are strangers on a train. Long is a voyeur: While riders sit armed with iPods or sometimes asleep, he privately observes, covertly getting to know them. “I’ve never once spoken in any way to anyone that I’ve drawn,” Long explains, “People just get too insular on the subway and they don’t really pay attention to what’s happening.”
His work evokes that haunting feeling of loneliness in crowds. The majority of Long’s sketches are of isolated individuals, candid moments of oblivion or reflection. When he does draw multiple figures, they are often unrelated, either unaware of the other’s presence or just indifferent to the crush of humanity around them.
And somehow this isolation feels more natural than direct interaction. Though the formal signs of an artistic education are present in Long’s drawings (he has a degree in illustration from the School of Visual Arts), they also possess a casual, unstilted quality—something lacking in today’s high tech world of super polished imagery. We live in a state of immediacy, where fleeting moments can quickly be captured with a camera phone and disseminated online. But Long says his unstaged portraits are more personal than a snapshot, “I can look back on my subject and remember very specific details about how they were moving, whether they were nervous … but I don’t think I could remember that if I had only observed them for a brief second through a camera lens.” In some ways, Long is old-fashioned—managing to slow the information age, if only for a moment, before he posts his sketches to his blog.
