Dead Worker's Paintings Exhibited
He Made Art of the Subways

By ARI PAUL

New York City Transit worker Marvin Franklin was just three years from putting together the perfect life. A Track Worker with 22 years on the job, he was going to retire, live off his pension and devote his future to art and helping those less fortunate. But he was killed on the job in April, the second of two Track Workers to die in that way within five days, when he was stuck by a train going through his work site.

The Chief-Leader/Eirini Vourloumis AN UNDERGROUND CANVAS: Most of Marvin Franklin's paintings of subway scenes are watercolors, which Roxanne Robertson, the Transit Museum's Director of Special Projects, said 'is very hard to do, because it tends to bleed. You don't get do-overs in watercolor.' Here he depicts a man waiting on a subway platform.

He left behind a large collection of artwork. From Dec. 18 until March 30, 2008, dozens of Mr. Franklin's sketches and paintings will be on display at the NYC Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn, a decommissioned subway station just two blocks from the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop on the A/C and G lines, where he was killed at the age of 55 this spring.

Prime Material: Riders

A prolific painter and draftsman who earned a degree in illustrated arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Mr. Franklin used his sketchpad to depict life on the subway. The exhibit begins with its only non-subway-related work and only oil painting: A self-portrait. Below that is a sketchbook opened to a page featuring a fellow Track Worker. Next to that is another sketchbook that is believed to be his last; it has the most-recent date and is the only one with blank pages.

Mr. Franklin's paintings capture the everyday passengers he saw on the F line between his home in Queens and Manhattan, including buskers, students, commuters, mothers with children and, most importantly for him, the homeless people who called a subway car shelter.

A Queens native, Mr. Franklin had spent some time homeless, and after emerging from destitution, he became a Track Worker. He had been painting since he was a young boy, said step-daughter Kristen Jones of New Jersey, and after he suffered an injury on the job 10 years ago, he used the time off to take classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan, which he attended until his death.

Track work was ideal for Mr. Franklin, because it allowed him to work at night and spend every weekday at the league. He focused much of his art on the homeless people he encountered on the subway, and even did a series on homelessness that won an award. Ms. Jones sometimes rode with Mr. Franklin on the train from Queens into Manhattan and watched him sketch people. She explained that he gave food to homeless people on the train in exchange for them being the subjects of his sketches.

When Mr. Franklin died, he was three years away from qualifying to retire at full pension, and he had planned to become an art instructor and to sell art in hopes of donating some of the proceeds to the Coalition for the Homeless.

His paintings are marked by his ability to control a difficult medium, as the majority of the paintings in the exhibit are watercolors.

"Watercolor is very hard to do, because it tends to bleed," said Roxanne Robertson, the museum's Director of Special Projects. "You don't get do-overs in watercolor."

Images of Compassion

The Chief-Leader/Eirini Vourloumis ART WITH A CONSCIENCE: Track Worker Marvin Franklin's art often focused on homeless people he encountered on the subway. He had hoped that after he retired he would sell art and donate some of the proceeds to fighting homelessness. His step-daughter recalled that he would give food to homeless people as compensation for sketching them.

The works he created were almost impressionistic, in that up close certain images appear nebulous, though when the viewer steps back they are revealed as the ubiquitous markers of the city subway, such as a system map, an advertisement for a coat drive featuring the Statue of Liberty shivering in the freezing cold and a Pearl Paint bag used as a purse by a woman wearing only one shoe.

Even when the colors do bleed, they add texture and definition to the pictures. In one painting of a man with dreadlocks and Chuck Taylor sneakers on a subway platform, black paint is bleeding on the upper left hand side, though it could easily depict water damage on the white-tiled subway wall.

The sketches on display are also central to the exhibit, Ms. Robertson explained. Mr. Franklin sketched passengers with a ballpoint pen while commuting on the train and translated them with paint in the studio at the school.

"A sketchbook basically connects to his heart, and then later works evolve," she said. "This is why the show is different."

Big Hand From TWU

After Mr. Franklin's death, officials at the NYC Transit Museum heard that he was an artist through news reports and learned that his work had been on display in galleries and published in a number of magazines. Museum officials decided to put together a show of his work. They reached out to Transport Workers Union Local 100, which played an essential role in establishing the exhibit.

"It was really facilitated by TWU Local 100," said Robert Del Bagno, the museum's Senior Manager for Exhibits. "They gave some funding and just a lot of moral support and put us in touch with the family and really helped the whole process move along."

Local 100 provided much of the funding for the exhibit. The union was scheduled to host a fundraiser at the exhibit Dec. 19 for its Widows and Orphans Fund. The program begins at 6 p.m., and it costs $50 to attend.

Trains to Carry His Work

This is not the first posthumous exhibition of Mr. Franklin's work. The 1199 Gallery at the Martin Luther King Jr. Labor Center in Manhattan showed some of his work from Nov. 9 to Dec. 7.

Ms. Jones said that there are tentative plans to display reproductions of his work on subway cars. The message, she said, was two-fold. On the one hand, he would have wanted art to be more accessible to the everyday person. And on the other, the artwork could be a public reminder of the dangers that so many NYC Transit workers face on the job.

"Our goal is that hopefully it will be a catalyst for improving track safety," Ms. Jones said. "Marvin did this for 22 years. I knew he got up every night to go to work, but I never put it together that he was down there on the tracks."