New York Times Article: The Artist in Search of a Patron
New York Times: Bowery
THE ARTIST IN SEARCH OF A PATRON
By SUZANNE LABARRE
“It develops itself,” Sir Shadow says of his one-line method. “You feed it with action, and it starts developing feet, legs and it starts walking.”
THE only bright spot on the Bowery at Great Jones Street that rainy evening was a halogen-lit storefront packed floor to ceiling with ink studies of jazz musicians, dancers and slinky nudes.
Behind the window, a tall, hulking figure wearing a dark, double-breasted suit befitting Sunday Mass slouched over a sketch pad. Pressing the point of his silver pen onto the page, he looped it around a couple of times, sloped down toward a corner and moved it back up, forming a long, inverted bell. Less than a minute later, the artist flashed his finished work, which had been completed in a single stroke: a wiry three-piece band, the instruments melded seamlessly into limbs, hands and heads.
With these motions, the Lower East Side artist who calls himself Sir Shadow hopes to make millions. Sir Shadow recently offered to pay $1 million to the person who helps him earn his first $2 million. “The Third Million I Make Is Yours,” says a flier affixed to the door of his 200-square-foot art gallery adjoining the Whitehouse, a shabby youth hostel-cum-flophouse that sits opposite the gleaming new Bowery Hotel.
The reward, continues the flier, is open to “anyone, any team, any group, or any corporation who can help take my art to the next level.” “I would like to see my one-line art on pillowcases, sheets, towels, merchandise, leather jackets, silks, dishware, clothing line, jewelry, animation, neon, and any other capital venture.”
On a recent afternoon, Sir Shadow parked his long limbs on a wooden bench at Think Coffee and talked about the changing face of a neighborhood once home primarily to the down and out. “There’s no soul, no touch,” he said. “There’s people looking at you like, ‘Where you come from?’ I’m like: ‘Where y’all come from? Y’all just moved to my neighborhood.’ ”
He never went to art school, having learned the single-line technique simply through repetition. “It develops itself,” he says. “You feed it with action, and it starts developing feet, legs and it starts walking. The next thing you know, people calling you an artist.”
Sir Shadow has been producing these drawings for three decades, but his gallery in the Whitehouse was born 15 months ago, when Meyer Muschel, then the building’s owner, abandoned plans to convert part of the hotel’s ground floor space into a cafe, and instead handed it over to Sir Shadow rent-free. “My accommodation to him,” said Mr. Muschel, who sold the building last June, but handles day-to-day operations and keeps a calendar illustrated with Sir Shadow’s drawings in his office.
Despite the exposure Sir Shadow gets from the gallery, his $1 million offer remains unclaimed.
“People came and said they down,” he said. “They say they got this new person, that middleman or something. And for some reason, nothing’s happening. The universe is at a standstill.”