If you ride the subways every day you probably think you've seen just about everything, but a city psychiatrist shows that art can be made in the subway. NY1's Transit reporter Tina Redwine filed the following report.
Look carefully the next time you are on a subway, as someone might be recording your image. But not with a camera, because this man is a sculptor, not a stalker.
Artist-psychiatrist Peter Bulow brings clay to life on the subway. On Tuesday, he was hard at work on a ride from Upper Manhattan to East New York, Brooklyn on the C train.
Bulow says he started sculpting on the subway four years ago because he was bored on his commutes to his psychiatric practice and research jobs in the Bronx.
The doctor usually has to work fast. He's done hundreds of miniature sculptures and says these rides are now the high point of his day.
"It's thrilling. I feel like I'm connecting with people somehow, but also really calm within myself," says Bulow. "It takes a lot of concentration. You have to get their expression, it has to be beautiful, it has to look like them. It has to be three-dimensional all the way around, has to be a composition. You have to do all that in a minute or five minutes or whatever you have. It's like riding a roller coaster. You have something forever, of a person you once saw."
One of the people Bulow saw and sculpted on the A train was a Sikh man wearing a turban. The following year, Bulow saw the Sikh man in the office.
"He's a neurologist from India and he's come to volunteer in my lab. So that was a hoot," says Bulow.
As a child in Berlin, Bulow sculpted. He moved to Queens in junior high school and went on to earn a studio art and a medical degree.
In his practice, Bulow connects verbally, while the sculpting allows him to visually communicate what he feels is the essence of his subject.
"I want to convey that sense of mystery that makes people want to know that person that I sculpted," says Bulow.
Bulow enlarged 12 of his miniature sculptures to exhibit in Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan. These straphangers will be on display until the end of June.
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