Going through our digital archives, I stumbled upon this video.
Although it’s been a while since it was taken, I remember how it happened. We still lived on the East Coast and visited New York City quite often frequenting our favorite less traveled places there. One of them was the High Line Park. Back then, it was not as popular as it became today. It was quiet and pleasant place that only locals knew about.
One day lazily walking there we spotted a small group of onlookers standing on the side of the path and intensely staring at something. Curiosity took over, and we joined them wondering what was going on. We saw a guy wearing a white overall painted over with some characters and abstract black images. Couple minutes later he began to… create. I can not say that he was painting – he was using a spray can, and was moving seemingly randomly over the white sheet. Nevertheless, the result was shaping into something that somehow resonated with your mind. A little bit further, on the building wall there was a huge mural that was definitely produced in the same technique.
Obviously, it was done by a talented artist, but who he was we did not know. We made a video and forgot about it.
Finally, couple days ago I discovered his name. It was fairly easy since the mural that we photographed had some words written on the right side. Search for “Betten” produced multiple images close to the one I had. It turned out that the artist’s name was, unsurprisingly, Jordan Betten. He is a NYC based artist and the founder of Lost Art, a luxury leather brand.
Mystery solved!