P.J. Clarke’s 1978

LeRoy Neiman made this painting of P.J. Clarke’s, and you can almost smell the beer and hear the din of the crowd, can't you? Look how the colours swarm together, little dashes and blobs everywhere like confetti. I can imagine Neiman, perched somewhere, rapidly capturing the scene, his brush dancing across the canvas to bottle the energy. I'm thinking, what a challenge it must have been, to wrangle all of that action, light, and people. He’s dealing with a kind of organized chaos and those quick brushstrokes give it all a sense of movement. He wants you to see it all – the bottles behind the bar, the faces of the people, the menus. Like little glimpses into the night. You know, I'm reminded of other painters who documented everyday life like Toulouse-Lautrec, or even Philip Guston in his later figurative years. It makes you wonder about how we see and remember places. About how artists keep that conversation going through time.