Tonight on my way home from Troy, NY, I ran into an artist in the 14th Street A/C/E station, Joseph Griffith, whose UFO-filled, pastel drawings I saw, liked and bought on University Place in the Village several years ago. Joseph is still drawing, still selling his work in the streets and subway stations, and seemed well and happy.

Joseph’s work centers on New York street scenes, subway trains in motion, and the UFOs that swoop down out of the sky to destroy them with laser beams, as well as tranquil night scenes of lampposts beneath elevated subway tracks, bright and silent apartment windows. Recently he has started to branch out into absurd and impressionist work. One of the drawings on display tonight was a copy of [that one Picasso or Degas or Matisse with the naked ladies dancing in a circle].

He has drawn UFOs because of their popularity for so long, “6 years,” that they gave him nightmares, so he stopped for a while.

Homeless for 12 yrs, Joseph lived in shelters — including the one on Ward’s Island where Bill Etra lived for the past 9 months or so until, happily, the city gave him his long-awaited apartment — and slept on trains when he couldn’t stand the shelters. He’s now living in a city apartment on 43rd Street. He took from his briefcase, containing papers and bundles of pencils, a nice little postcard-size photobook of his work that one of his collectors has put together. Some of the drawings within were in perspective, which I hadn’t seen in his work, as well as mixed media: figures of men cut from newspapers and glued into the scene.

The first time I met him he walked with a cane. Tonight he was seated in a wheelchair drawing but stood to get my change out of his pocket. I bought a drawing of UFOs attacking subway cars.

And this is the new drawing I bought yesterday.