new york in the spring

Happy (belated) Easter! I hope you had a good weekend. We usually spend Easter stuffing our faces with delicious homemade food and drinks with both sides of Mike's family, but this year we spent the day in New York City. 

We were invited down to catch a basketball game at Madison Square Garden in the luxury suite where one of my commissioned paintings hangs.  (This spring visit was surprisingly identical to my fall visit and our winter visit - chilly and overcast, with threatening raindrops and enough wind to undo my feeble attempts to look sophisticated and newyorky. Maybe I'll try again in the summer.) We hopped a Greyhound bus and were quickly wandering the streets of Manhattan together, my brain once again in awe of the insane amount of architectural eye candy and street art.

I don't know what it is about graffitti. I know people hate it. I love it. I can't help it, really. Someone talk some sense into me. Next year.

Before heading to Madison Square Garden, we walked the High Line and got lunch at a restaurant called Park, which looked like the Jumanji-esque factory-turned-home of my dreams. There were plants, factory windows, tiny birds flitting about and a mean glass of sangria (okay two). Seriously... I could live here. If in some future life I am born a bird, that will be my little bird goal.  

It was so awesome to meet the couple who sought me out and gave me almost entirely free range on this painting, despite my habit of updating them via mostly disjointed, typo-strewn stream-of-consciousness brainstorming emails at 2am throughout the project. Seeing my painting again, hung and doing its big painting thing during an actual event with actual lights, was wonderful. (When we delivered it in December, the suite had no lights on because The Rolling Stones and Adam Sandler were doing their sound-check for 12/12/12. No complaints here.) It's still exactly how I pictured it when I sat down to three huge blank canvases in October.

My goal for the next few years is to mature my style into one that is at home in commercial settings as well as residential ones, to see my work on album covers, snowboards, event posters, local restaurants and other transformations that are relevant to my life. So it felt great to get positive feedback on this piece, which was a (big) baby step towards expanding my range. With wine in hand we chatted, watched Boston's Celtics lose pretty pitifully to the Knicks (sad), booed Chris Brown on the jumbotron (deserved), and grabbed the bus back home... a most excellent Easter.