Tim and Jeremy are both waiters at a restaurant in downtown New York City. During slow times at work, to stave off boredom when it is slow, the two young men draw pictures. These pictures are made using ink and what is called the "Triple Dupe Pad," a book of paper used to place orders in the kitchen. The drawings usually take about a week to make, all the while also being used by fellow employees to take orders; this sometimes leads to other collaborators or in a couple cases, to the loss of the work. The drawings are then scanned and colored in Photoshop where they come to life in stunning technicolor! The subject matter varies from piece to piece, as they are made over a long course of time and under various moods and states of mind. They all retain a playfulness that serves as a coping mechanism after spending a night catering to the endless needs of hungry patrons.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

#48 "The Last Macy's Day Parade" December 14, 2011

(Click on the Image to make it LARGER!)

This busy monstrosity was started by one of our customers. Not the drawing, but the character that it inspired. Can you guess which one? No, it's not the Satan-like character with the baby head, although we do have some customers who resemble that remark. It could almost be the guy next to him with the mustache. That guy kind of looks like my friend Brew Dude's dad, and we actually have a customer who looks exactly like Brew Dude's dad but he happens to be black. So, not his dad, but I do always text Brew Dude when his "black dad" comes in. I want them to meet someday and see if they are really related. So, anyway, the inspirational character is the woman on the left with the bandaged nose. That actual woman came into the restaurant sometime in the late autumn of 2011 and sat in my section and I drew her in between taking her order, giving her some drinks, and eventually the check. Since we are located in New York City, and Greenwich in general, we have a lot of wealthy customers coming in to eat and drink at the restaurant. A lot of these customers are getting on in age and have enough money to "fix" themselves with various forms of cosmetic surgery. This poor woman came into the restaurant not an hour out of getting a nose job, I am almost positive. Her face was all puffed up, her lips had been botoxed, she had two black eyes (since they have to break the nose to make the new one) and bandages upon bandages on her nose. You're probably thinking, maybe she just fell down and you are judging her to be a face altering, nose-job getting, vanity case. To that I say, you might not be wrong! She may have passed out on the subway platform onto the tracks and was rescued just in the nick of time by a handsome fire fighter who was off duty and leaped down onto the tracks to scoop her up and whisk her off to safety only to break her nose and black both of her eyes in the process on account of the fire fighter being so devastatingly handsome and strong. This could also have happened and I am a mean person for thinking otherwise, and then actually gone ahead and drawn her whilst also serving her food. However, this is New York City and we are living in the modern times. These are the times of constant video and camera surveillance from Big Brother and Little Brother alike. Everyone has an iPhone and they are constantly taking pictures of people and things out in the world that make it up on the internet without the subject ever knowing it. Everyday on the internet people are posting pictures of sleeping people on the subway and random fashion mistakes on the sidewalk. We have become a nation of paparazzi. In fact, there was that guy who live tweeted a breakup that he overheard on a rooftop in Brooklyn this week and it got picked up by news organizations all over the world! People have been calling New York the "naked city" for decades now because of the lack of privacy. Nowadays, with all this social technology, the lack of privacy has grown exponentially, but it has always been this way in New York. You can hear your neighbors above and below you. You can see into the windows of your neighbors across the street. You hear people telling other people all kinds of crazy things on cellphones on the street, and overhear people telling insane stories at obnoxious levels in restaurants. The City is basically like a Chat Roulette every five feet that you walk down the sidewalk. I say all of this just to justify drawing a picture of a person who came in to dine at the place where I work. It is not the first time I have done that and it certainly was not the last, and if I had never said anything about the subject, you would think that all the characters are being harnessed from my mentally insane imagination. However, art imitates life, and life imitates the internet these days, so I guess I'm going to be drawing a lot more zeros and ones. 

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