Welcome (Back) To Krikko’s New Haven

Christopher Peak Photo

Here: Krikko notes Union Station on his New Haven drawing.

Transit-riders heading down escalators to the tracks at Union Station can once again get a glimpse of their final destinations — New York City, Boston and, yes, New Haven — through the famed lead-pencil drawings of Gregory Krikko” Obbott, a local artist whose prints have been sold worldwide.

Krikko’s drawings of the Northeast’s great cities had hung in Union Station’s flanks, near the bathrooms, vending machines and offices, for 14 years — until they were taken down during the building’s remodel. Last week the framed pictures were nailed up again. Now, the prints are bigger and in a more heavily trafficked location, right beneath the departure board.

Lue Hemingway, New Haven Parking Authority’s facilities manager who grew up in the Hill, said he was pleased to have local artwork beautifying the historic space.

On Friday afternoon, as the Metro-North trains emptied customers, Krikko bounced about the space, reminiscing and reexamining his pieces. He exploded in joy when he saw a boy with a guitar and he laughed at the sight of a girl plopping down to sit on the escalator. Then he and an old pal, 78-year-old Van Walker, watched from a bench in the lobby, seeing who’d stop and look at his drawings, some of which took years to finish.

Those who paused, like an older woman with a suitcase and a boy with bulky headphones, stood mesmerized as they pored over the intricate scenes. Another woman jotted down on a sheet of newspaper the name of the Hill Museum of Arts, where Krikko had just hosted guests from Colombia and India.

A traveler admires Krikko’s most famous picture, “Super Big Apple.”

It’s always been my dream to put up my artwork in a public space,” Krikko said. It makes me feel good, like I did something constructive.”

A 64-year-old Nigerian immigrant, Krikko has been putting pencil to paper ever since preschool, when he used to sketch construction sites, houses and other buildings. After arriving in the United States in 1974, he enrolled in architectural school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. A tiff with a professor there who failed him led to a semester-long suspension. That’s when Krikko first started working on his cityscapes.

They served as a kind of protest art” against the strictures of architecture, Krikko said. After years of admiring and copying façades into his sketchbook, he’d originally thought of architecture as a fine art. Aformal education in its rules made him realize he’d overlooked the importance of a building’s functionality.

Still, Krikko wasn’t entirely turned off from the profession. He designed residential units full-time for a decade, renovated and built the museum himself (with the physical and financial help of his buddy Walker, who cleared out trash and chased off drug users returning to the former dope den with a hammer), and still designs the occasional project, including a forthcoming building on Congress Avenue.

His pencil art reflects his ambivalence about architecture’s formal constraints. Krikko uses maps as a reference to make sure his drawing all lines up, and his buildings are depicted precisely, even down to the number of windows.

They’re essentially like the renderings he learned to do in design classes, and they can be equally painstaking to complete. A typical building — take the Connecticut Financial Center, for instance — might take three days to finish sketching and shading. Even individual bricks are visible on Yale’s residential colleges, which would satisfy the architecture critic looking through a loupe.

And yet, the drawings are so much more than an engineer’s blueprint or mapmaker’s knockoff. They’re neither a typical landscape against a flat horizon, nor are they an overhead bird’s‑eye scene. Instead, Krikko uses a disorienting perspective. The viewer hovers just above the metropolis’s tallest buildings, almost as if one is looking out a window as an airplane descends toward the runway. That’s where it becomes so unique, picking the angle where I want to draw from. It’s like composing music,” he said.

Krikko, who always sits down to draw with jazz (like Weather Report, Miles Davis and Chuck Mangione) playing, took some artistic license” with the streetscape, crowding cars into Manhattan’s intersections and placing horses across from New Haven’s Green.

Val Walker and Krikko, next to two of the five pictures hanging in Union Station.

He said he’d rather sketch skyscrapers than build one.

All you do is stack them up and get an engineer to design it,” Krikko said, adding, Who’s going to give me a skyscraper to design?”

Krikko made it big, literally and figuratively, with a 20-by-15-foot drawing of Manhattan. It took him four years and 2,496 lead pencils. (He spent three months on one vexing section of Central Park, only to realize it didn’t align with Midtown and started over; the bridges, too, caused him a great deal of stress, sometimes looking like they were floating in the darkened East River, forcing him to try again and again.) A scaled-down version now can be found in shops throughout Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the United Nations and the Statue of Liberty.

In addition to Union Station and the museum in the Hill, the bigger, framed versions of the black-and-white prints are on view at City Hall in the mayor’s office, the Corsair apartments, the Chase Bank branch, and plenty of doctors and lawyers’ offices around town. Two decades ago, Krikko’s agent sent a copy to Donald Trump, back when he was just a real estate mogul on Fifth Avenue. (In a letter, Trump thanked him very, very much” for the awe inspiring” picture.)

Krikko with drawings just below the departure board.

Walker said of the Union Station location, It’s a spot to show the work. We enjoy it every day we see it and think about it. They’ll enjoy it because they get a chance to see it and praise it. It warrants it.”

A resident of New Haven since 1990, when he left New York’s rising rents, Krikko is now switching up his perspective to avoid falling into boredom through repetition. In the latest project underway, one looks down on Central Park as if caught midway through a sky-dive. The older you are, the more you see,” Krikko says. I wanted to flip it around. Like jazz, you experiment.”

Krikko, who said he stays fit with two 6.5‑mile runs every week, has big plans ahead. He occasionally updates the cityscapes with new buildings. (The Freedom Tower digitally replaced the World Trade Center towers; 360 State Street, on the other hand, hasn’t made the New Haven one yet.) If money comes through, Krikko wants to animate the drawings in Union Station, so that one could tap a building and learn about it.

In the meantime, even if he can’t pull that off, Krikko has a bucket list of cities to draw — London, Sydney and Tokyo — and he wants to bring his artwork into more public venues across the Northeast. Next stop: Grand Central Station.

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