For an Artist by Night, Local Bars Are His Studio, Napkins His Canvas

Steve Gordon, at the bar of Wei West in Battery Park City, draws one of his napkin artworks. At right is a piece he titled "Larry Is a Funny Guy," which he posted recently on Instagram. Photo of Gordon by Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Steve Gordon is seated with his bags of colored markers and a vodka and grapefruit juice at the bar of Wei West in Battery Park City. Dampness from the cold glass had spread across the bar, smearing the figure he's been drawing on a napkin.

"That could be good, that could work," says Gordon, studying the tiny work, an abstract portrait of the woman a seat away from him who is engrossed in a conversation with another man. "You see how the colors are coming alive?"

He watches as the reds and greens bleed some more.

"Yeah, that changes the whole deal. The fans will like it, but I'm not going to post it unless I believe in it."

Those "fans" are his followers on Instagram, and they number some 4,300. Nearly every night for the past year and a half, often at one of three Battery Park City bars, Gordon, a veteran entertainment lawyer by day, can be found drawing and drinking, sometimes far into the night, as he creates his latest work of napkin art.

Gordon had his first gallery show last week, a four-day exhibit at Cloud Gallery in Tribeca that came about after Wei West manager Sam Cao texted his friend, the gallery's owner Ying Pan.

Pan recalled the text. "Sam said, 'One customer is painting on my inventory of napkins. This guy is really crazy about art.' He wanted to know my opinion of it."

At the gallery reception, Pan called Gordon a serious artist whose work demonstrates that "simple does not mean it's not powerful.”

“You can see there are lots of emotions,” she said.

They are emotions that Gordon, 61, who works out of his apartment in Battery Park City's Gateway Plaza, talks about freely, starting with the drawing he calls "Deborah and Her Demons." Sketched on a napkin long ago, it is the image of a woman's bare back that he rediscovered less than two years ago.

It is that napkin that set Gordon on his path of nightly napkin art.

He says Deborah was the love of his life, a woman who left him 30 years ago without a goodbye.

"So it's been 30 years of silence, but ironically this image inspired everything else,"  he says. “I think the connect there is that I found it very soothing and healing. I felt less alone."

Drawing in bars, he says, is his way of connecting with the people there. He calls the artwork “a little like relationships.” If he cannot hit it off with the woman next to him, he can have her, in his own way, on a thin paper napkin. And he is "liked" by many; often more than 100 followers respond to his Instagram posts.

Each night, Gordon says, he is chased by loneliness, to Wei West, or SouthWestNY or the Black Hound Bar in Battery Park City, or to the St. George Tavern on Washington Street. First comes the vodka and grapefruit juice, then maybe another, before he grabs the bags of markers from a heavy leather briefcase, plops them on the bar, and proceeds to find a subject.

At Wei West this evening, it is the hand and hair of a woman named Livia that sparks his interest. She is unaware as he takes some pictures with his phone and then begins to draw.

Most of his subjects, he says, like what they see. “When you pay attention to people, ninety-nine percent of the time they love the attention.”

At the other end of the bar, Richard Fipphen, a lawyer, holds up his phone with the picture that Gordon drew of him back in January.

“I was just sitting here and I didn’t even know he was drawing me until I saw it on Instagram,” Fipphen says. “He’s always drawing and you don’t know what he’s doing. He could be looking in one direction or the other and unless you’re actually staring at what he’s staring at you don’t know.”

Asked how he likes the drawing, Fipphen is enthusiastic.

“He gave me hair!"

Gordon insists he is not a good artist. That’s what he says his father, a commercial artist, told him as a kid, leading him to abandon an early interest in watercolors. In the ’90s, working for Sony Music, he says he would go to a club every night, high on cocaine and then drink and draw people as he saw them—as dingoes, wild dogs. That period ended, as did the coke, Gordon says. And he would not take up drawing again until he found “Deborah and Her Demons.”

“So wherever you are Deborah, somewhere in Long Island, thank you.”

At Wei West, Claudia, the bartender, tells Gordon that the kitchen is closing. Does he want something to eat? Soup maybe? She brings him hot-and-sour, which he will barely touch.

Gordon says he is exhausted. He stands and pulls out a cigar, ready to take it outside before offering a final thought.

“I always feel sorry for people in bars who are flirting and talking back and forth because they’re not saying anything they’ll remember tomorrow and they don’t mean anything they say now. And they are so miserably alone because there’s no genuine connection with strangers. At the end of the day you feel lonelier and more alone than when you started.”

“But with me,” he adds, “I have something to keep.”