gowanus

Gowanus is an overlooked industrial neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York. It is bordered by Red Hook and Carroll Gardens to the west, Park Slope to the east and is characterised by the Gowanus Canal which, once a busy cargo hub, has declined in tandem with domestic shipping. The canal is heavily polluted and urban legend claims it as a Mafia dumping ground. A character in Jonathan Lethem's detective novel Motherless Brooklyn refers to it as "the only body of water in the world that is 90% guns." As other areas have become re-zoned for residential purposes, Gowanus maintains its identity as a district that continues to offer affordable work spaces to artists and individual businesses. A long-abandoned transit authority power substation in the area has been reclaimed and occupied by squatters and artists who oppose corporatisation by Wall Street. It sits on a site worth $27m but has yet to be re-developed because it's located next to the Russian-style environmental disaster of the aforementioned canal. I'm a libertarian and I believe that empty, abandoned buildings are up for grabs.

A local artist, Ella Yang, has produced a number of oil paintings depicting the urban landscape in and around the Gowanus neighbourhood. The two featured here are from a series titled "Representational oil paintings made in Brooklyn without Irony". Some of these works appeal to me because they offer up a certain romanticism in the way that beauty is revealed in the distinctly ordinary. Her style is American realism, and vaguely redolent of Edward Hopper, one of my favourite painters. For me, sometimes the seduction of a painting lay in its power to produce the wish to step into it. Depictions of urban settings: canals, wharves, warehouses, bridges and streets arrow-straight can have this effect on me in a way that a picturesque mountain pasture never does.