Trash receptacle at 256 West 108th Street at Broadway, Upper West Side, Manhattan

February 2001

This trash receptacle turned out to belong to a restaurant. I got caught by the restaurant’s owner, but fortunately he liked the painting, so he told me that I could finish it. He was a watercolorist in his spare time and liked landscape paintings. We talked a lot about the relative difficulty of oil versus watercolor painting. I said that I thought watercolors are much more difficult because you can’t fix your mistakes. Around lunchtime, he brought me a sandwich and some coffee.

The painting is based on Richard Wilson’s painting of Croome Court and was still there when I was last uptown.