by Ligh-tman
This year summer came early to New York. As usual, the moment the sun comes out, New Yorkers fill up the streets with their summer outfit- shorts, sandals, hats, beach clothing, even though the temperature is still not warm enough to go to the beach.
Perhaps it’s because winters are so long in New York, I mean, six months of a temperature oscillating between 50 F to zero or below zero, often topped with snow storms, blizzards, icy rains and recently even tornados.
As I look out of my window into the streets, I see people riding on bicycles and I think about my friend, the Brooklyn-based English/Mexican painter Dylan Williams, and his obsession a few years ago of girls on bicycles.
I remember he used to carry his camera equipped with heavy huge professional lenses, and drove all over the city to find girls on bicycles and photographed them. Sometimes he made sketches.
If I did not know him well I would have thought he had a fetish, still, I asked him; I was curious. He could not explain why, “something about them, shape of the bike, the way the girls move their body, the expression in their faces, the urban landscape, I don’t know…it’s interesting, and beautiful…”
That year he painted day and night and profusely on the subject of Girls on Bicycles both in oil and pastel in different formats and sizes. He used vibrant, electrifying colors as if to convey the emotions that he had experienced when watching these girls.
It’s been a while I had seen those paintings and strangely on a day like today, I remember them and wish to share them with you. I am glad I have kept these photos.
