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Description
“In the small hours, when everyone was asleep including the drunken night watch, I took a moldy life belt from the deck and went over the edge into the icy sea. I had seen lights dimly flickering in the blackness, how far I did not know. But I began to drive my frozen body towards them and an hour later pulled myself up onto a sandy beach crusted with frost. I did not know it, but my first steps in the New World were on the beach at Gravesend Bay, Coney Island. The lights I had seen came from guttering oil lamps in the windows of some miserable shacks at the top of the beach, beyond the tide line, and when I stumbled towards them and looked through the filthy panes I saw rows of huddled men skinning and gutting fresh-caught figs. Further down the line of huts there was an empty space in the middle of which burned a great bonfire and round it a dozen wretches were crouched, drawing the heat into their bodies. Half-dead from cold, I knew I too must share that heat of freeze to death. I walked into the light of the great fire, felt the wave of heat, and looked at them. My mask was stuffed inside my clothes, this terrible head and face was lit by the flames. They turned and stared at me.

I have hardly ever laughed in my life. There has been no cause to. But that night in the subzero predawn cold I laughed inside myself for sheer relief. There looked at me… and took no notice. For one way of another every one of them was deformed. By a sheer chance I had come upon the nightly encampment of the Outcasts of Gravesend Bay, the rejects who could only make a miserable living by gutting and cleaning fish while the fishermen and the city slept.”

-Erik Muhlheim, Frederick Forsyth’s “The Phantom of Manhattan” Chapter 2

So here's the first of them. As I said in my journal, you can make anti-PoM comments if you so desire, but out of respect to my non-PotO watchers, I will hide them if I feel they are getting out of hand.

Acrylic on Bristol board, 5 1/2 x 7 inches

Description
“In the small hours, when everyone was asleep including the drunken night watch, I took a moldy life belt from the deck and went over the edge into the icy sea. I had seen lights dimly flickering in the blackness, how far I did not know. But I began to drive my frozen body towards them and an hour later pulled myself up onto a sandy beach crusted with frost. I did not know it, but my first steps in the New World were on the beach at Gravesend Bay, Coney Island. The lights I had seen came from guttering oil lamps in the windows of some miserable shacks at the top of the beach, beyond the tide line, and when I stumbled towards them and looked through the filthy panes I saw rows of huddled men skinning and gutting fresh-caught figs. Further down the line of huts there was an empty space in the middle of which burned a great bonfire and round it a dozen wretches were crouched, drawing the heat into their bodies. Half-dead from cold, I knew I too must share that heat of freeze to death. I walked into the light of the great fire, felt the wave of heat, and looked at them. My mask was stuffed inside my clothes, this terrible head and face was lit by the flames. They turned and stared at me.

I have hardly ever laughed in my life. There has been no cause to. But that night in the subzero predawn cold I laughed inside myself for sheer relief. There looked at me… and took no notice. For one way of another every one of them was deformed. By a sheer chance I had come upon the nightly encampment of the Outcasts of Gravesend Bay, the rejects who could only make a miserable living by gutting and cleaning fish while the fishermen and the city slept.”

-Erik Muhlheim, Frederick Forsyth’s “The Phantom of Manhattan” Chapter 2

So here's the first of them. As I said in my journal, you can make anti-PoM comments if you so desire, but out of respect to my non-PotO watchers, I will hide them if I feel they are getting out of hand.

Acrylic on Bristol board, 5 1/2 x 7 inches