Shane Neufeld and the Grand Canal

Though the world is rich with urban landscapes that have inspired great art, there is only one grand canal – the Gowanus Canal, which separates the Park Slope and Carroll Gardens neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Sure it’s filthy and gloomy – but when’s the last time you saw anyone splashing around at the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, that great canalside monument to health and salvation in Venice?

Like its Venetian counterpart, Brooklyn’s grand canal is visually interesting not so much in its own right but because of the great structures that line and cross it. In Venice there is the Rialto, the the Ponte degli Scalzi and the Ponte dell'Accademia. The Gowanus Canal has the magnificent Culver Viaduct, on which the F and G trains of the IND (Independent) Subway come sweeping out of the ground just beyond the Carroll Street station, stop directly above the canal at the Smith-9th Street station and quickly swoop back underground again just east of the Fourth Street station. The Smith-9th Street platforms are a dizzying 90 feet above the canal – the highest point on the entire IND subway – the viaduct comprising the only elevated portion of the Independent lines.

At the risk of belaboring the analogy, let us agree that the idea of building a subway station right where the viaduct crosses the canal with a muscular cantilevered span is every bit as cool as lining the Rialto Bridge with retail establishments so that commerce need not stop at canal’s edge.

One person who has definitely figured that out is 25-year-old artist Shane Neufeld, the Titian of the Gowanus Canal. Perhaps that’s a bit hyperbolic, but how else to describe an oil painter whose idea of a great summer is to spend it in a parking lot beneath the Culver Viaduct making pictures of trucks?

Neufeld – who turns 26 this year on the auspicious date of September 11 – grew up in Brooklyn Heights, studied art (and English) at Amherst College and, while in western New England, developed a zest for drawing and painting landscapes. He ultimately resolved to go to graduate school in architecture, but not before he rented a studio near the Gowanus Canal for five months and found such great inspiration from its gloriously gloomy infrastructure.

“I paint in order to look more closely at my surroundings,” Neufeld reports at the beginning of the artist’s statement on his web site. What his paintings convincingly demonstrate is that we can, and should, apply the same standards of beauty and discernment to whatever happens to be around us. We should no more resign ourselves to ugliness while catching the F Train at Smith/9th Street than we would from the summit of Mount Ascutney in Vermont or Cardigan Mountain in New Hampshire.

You can check out Shane Neufeld’s work – and even acquire some – at McGowan Fine Art in Concord, New Hampshire.