NYC artist Zhenya Gershman was walking down a busy Manhattan street one day when she and her family encountered a homeless man holding a sign that read, “I might as well be invisible.”
It was then and there that the idea for her next painting series came to her. It would be a spotlight on the homeless.
“It was at that very moment that an idea was born: to paint a whole series of canvases giving visibility to the homeless, making the viewer see them as any human being deserves,” she said.
During that same encounter, her husband hugged the man and said, “I see you man.”
And in that second moment, the series was given a name: I See You.
The ‘I See You’ art series by Zhenya Gershman
The I See You series features 17 homeless people Gershman encountered since moving to NYC last year. She met many of them in the Fashion District, where her studio, Artishouse, is based.
The series also includes homeless children living in Los Angeles, which is where the kind-hearted artist lived before moving to the Big Apple.
The paintings are created on canvas using a mixture of oil and empathy. The people in her paintings take center stage.
“They are painted almost like icons. They are iconic,” Gershman, who is also an art teacher, said.
Painting since she was a child, Gershman, originally from Eastern Europe, always had a passion for using art to help ease the pains of the world. In addition to her series on the homeless, she started an art movement in 2022 called Brushes Over Bullets after her portrait, “First Face of War” sold for $100,000 at Heritage Auctions to benefit Ukraine.
In most of her portraits, the subjects are portrayed in a larger-than-life style, such as in the case of ‘Rachel,’ a 33-year-old woman Gershman got to know while working on her series. The painting is a cropped closeup of the hopelessness but friendliness Gershman saw in the young woman’s face.
“She was the one who stole my heart. I was going to my studio early on and all of a sudden she appeared on a corner right below my studio,” the artist said. “What stopped me is that she looked really young. I knew she was a little bit older than my daughter, but it could have been my child. I learned that she was 33 but she had this young look about her. I thought, ‘How does this young person end up on the street?’”
Over the first few weeks, Gershman did not ask Rachel to model for her. Instead, she brought her things that she needed, like a hot drink, clothes and food. The pair talked and interacted, and Rachel would ask her artist friend how she is doing and what she was currently painting.
As the friendship bloomed, Gershman was even able to get Rachel an inexpensive phone that she used to get on a waiting list for housing in New Jersey, which she eventually received.
But before Rachel left for the Garden State, Gershman said she finally got up the courage to ask her to be part of the I See You series.
“I didn’t want her to think that I was helping her just to get something in return. I wanted to tell her story and honor her,” Gershman said.
Not only was Rachel overjoyed about being asked, she confessed that she always wanted to be an artist, so Gershman bought her fellow artist one last gift before she moved: A sketch pad and pencils.
Rachel never got to see her finished portrait before she left the city, but Gershman hopes one day she will, perhaps in a newspaper or gallery.
‘Sunny’ was another model for Gershman. Actually, he was her first in the series. She recalled being at a Times Square subway station, nervous about asking him if she could photograph him for a painting, but he was very receptive. In a friendly and kind demeanor, he let her snap some photos.
“He allowed me to see him as he was, in his element,” she said. “He told me his name was Sunny, which was so perfect because there was like sun rays coming off him.”
Gershman later went back to Times Square to show Sunny his finished painting, but he wasn’t there.
The artist hopes to have another exhibit to showcase her work as she adds to the series.
“It’s going to continue. A larger exhibit would be great,” she said.
