Photo: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/Getty Images
A beloved member of the New York City art community has died.
Jason Polan, an artist who was on a quest to sketch every person in New York, died after battling colon cancer at the age of 37, his familyconfirmedtoThe New York TimesandThe Washington Post.
Polan had a rule for his quest: he would only draw his subjects in real time, meaning if they moved or walked away before he was finished, he wouldn’t go back to add in details he missed.
“When my drawings are missing a hand or something, it’s because people walk away. I think it’s cheating for me to add things I’m not looking at,” he told theNew York Timesin a2017 profile.
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/Getty Images
“I want things to be smart, but I think sometimes that if things are too clever it’s like,All right, enough already!” he told the outlet at the time, when he had already drawn 50,000 sketches. “There’s a balance I’m trying to get to. I don’t know how successful I am, but I’m trying to get better at that.”
The University of Michigan alum added in that interview that he tried to draw people who were unaware that they were his subject, but if someone happens to notice, “I’ll either immediately stop, because I don’t want them to feel weird, or I’ll give them the drawing so that they know I really just wanted to draw them.”
“I’m pretty shy,” he told the outlet.
Polan’slast sketchthat he shared on his “Every Person in New York” blog is titled “Man at Taco Bell on 2nd Avenue,” and features the back of a man sitting on a stool, bundled up in a puffy jacket. It was posted on December 16.
Polan, whose work has been featured inThe New York TimesandThe New Yorker, knew that he would never be able to actually draw every single person in the city, “but I enjoy trying,” he told theOman Daily Observerin 2011.
He also drew every piece of art in the Museum of Modern Art and founded the Taco Bell Drawing Club, which was open to anyone who wanted to join him at a Taco Bell in New York to sketch their surroundings.
“He was always drawing, whenever and wherever he was,” Polan’s father, Jesse Polan, told theWashington Post. “He really felt like he was helping people, because they enjoyed his art. It had quite a bit of humor in it, although that wasn’t the principle. He would see things that you really didn’t notice.”
source: people.com
