By Alison Gregor
Downtown painter captures ‘moody’ side of local saloons
Ellen Bradshaw has been visiting saloons for a year now. But it’s not the prospect of a good drink that is drawing her, it’s the bars themselves. Or rather their artistic potential.
A downtown resident, Bradshaw has been painting the saloons and restaurants of Tribeca, the Seaport and the Village capturing a haunting quality.
Her latest show, “New York Haunts,” ghosts and all, displays two dozen of her moody paintings. The show opens Oct. 19 at the Pleiades Gallery of Contemporary Art at 530 West 25th Street.
“Since they’re all really old bars and a lot of them claim to have ghosts, I thought I could tie the show in with October,” said the petite redhead, relaxing in her Greenwich Village studio, which is located near the top of a narrow, winding staircase in a quirky historical building itself.
“I think it’s the character of the old buildings themselves that attract me,” she added.
Or perhaps the characters. Bradshaw, 43, said her husband, a stockbroker and part-owner of the pub PJ Kelly’s on Fulton Street, often finds his way into her paintings.
“He’s got a character kind of face,” she said, chuckling. “He’s from lower Manhattan all his life, which is probably another reason that I paint lower Manhattan – he doesn’t ever leave.”
WWW Downtown Express
