There are so many great Coney Island artists it’s hard to pick one each month. This month I’d like to introduce you to the wonderful paintings of Ilene Isseks. I first saw Ilene’s painting, The Atlantis Bar—a bar I fictionalized in my novel—on one of the We Grew Up in Brighton Beach Facebook pages and she was nice enough to let me use it in my Places in the Book page on this website. Though I never met her, it turns out she’s an old friend of Marilyn’s, the same Marilyn who’s fictionalized in my novel. And, it also turns out, that The Atlantis Bar is hanging in the apartment of my former husband’s former girlfriend. It further turns out that she (the former girlfriend) is good friends with Ilene and it was nice to connect up with her. Now we’re all Facebook friends. Oh the wonders of Facebook!
To see more of her beautiful work, please go to:
http://ileneisseks.portfoliobox.net/urbanlandscapes
I love this painting because of its Edward Hopper quality. It seems to depict the loneliness of Coney Island when the crowds are gone. It’s the pedestrian walk known as the Bowery, which used to be the main midway through many of the amusements. Can you see a silhouette of a dragon’s head? It’s on the Dragon’s Cave dark ride which inspired one of my illustrations.
This is the old Thunderbolt. It had the rickety house under it depicted in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.
This is the bar I fictionalized in The Coney Island Book of the Dead.
The Half Moon Hotel is in the background.
Ilene Isseks
14 comments