Keith Thomson

In the time that painter Keith Thomson has been taking the New York City subway:

A Weill Cornell study found 637 species of bacteria and other microorganisms in the subway system. Nearly half of the DNA swabbed was unknown to science.[1]

A four-foot-long shark was found aboard the N train, possibly having boarded at Coney Island.[2]

Among the 277,233 items logged by New York City Transit’s Lost Property Unit as of July 2018: 7,584 pairs of pants, ninety-six trumpets, and twenty-seven death certificates.[3]

MetroCard swipe records led to both an acquittal and a conviction in two murder cases.[4]

Commuters seeking to avoid paying their fares took to sucking tokens out of the turnstile slots, leading the MTA to spray the turnstiles with chili powder.[5]

A Bronx social worker, mugged at knifepoint, got to talking with the mugger and offered to buy him dinner. The mugger returned the social worker’s wallet to him so he could pay.[6]

For Thomson, who paints for escapism, the question wasn’t whether the subway would yield enough subject matter for an entire show, but whether he could confine himself to just one. This show—Subway Series—was ultimately capped at twenty-two original paintings.

He also likes painting with burnt orange[7] and harvest gold.[8]

Keith Thomson studied drawing at Columbia University and the Sorbonne and then worked as a political cartoonist for The New Haven Register before becoming a writer and painter. His novels include the New York Times Best-Selling Once a Spy and 7 Grams of Lead. His nonfiction chronicle of Sir Walter Raleigh’s search for El Dorado, Paradise of the Damned, was published last year by Little, Brown. He and his family live in Alabama.

1 - https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2015/02/researchers-produce-first-map-of-new-york-city-subway-system- microbes-christopher-mason

2 - https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/07/us/new-york-subway-shark

3 - https://www.vice.com/en/article/dentures-trumpets-and-prosthetic-limbs-inside-the-subways-lost-and-found/

4 - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/nyregion/01murder.html and https://www.nydailynews.com/2002/06/01/met- rocard-swipes-killers-alibi/

5 - https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5j2m7d/til_that_in_new_york_subways_booth_attendants/

6 - https://storycorps.org/stories/julio-diaz/

7 - https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/color-finder/165-c

8 - https://www.colorxs.com/color/pantone-16-0948-tcx-harvest-gold