Chrissy Cohen
QUICK INKING: Ukrainian-born Brooklyn artist Yuriy Modlikskiy sketches subway rider Chrissy Cohen, who gets a kick out of her likeness yesterday. (Gabriella Bass)
To unsuspecting subway riders, he’s just an old man who keeps looking at them as he scribbles in a notepad.
But if they look closely, they usually learn they weren’t just commuting — they were unknowingly posing for one of Yuriy Modlikskiy’s amazing candid subway sketches.
The 65-year-old former Russian book illustrator, who is nearly deaf, passes the time on the F train recording the sea of faces he sees each day. He often presents the finished product to commuters for nothing more than the joy of watching their reaction.
“For you, a present,” Modlikskiy said during a recent trip, as he tapped a young, bearded man on the arm.
The expression on the man’s face quickly went from suspicious to delighted when he realized what Modlikskiy had created.
“Oh, wow, that’s amazing,” the man said. “Can you sign it for me?”
Born in Ukraine and raised in Belarus, Modlikskiy followed family members to New York 15 years ago from Moscow.
He had spent his life working as a book illustrator, penning pictures for more than 200 books — including a translation of “Treasure Island” and novels by the Russian writer Mikhail Veller.
But as his hearing deteriorated, it became impossible for him to get work drawing in America.
Eventually,, he got a job restoring art and antique furniture in Manhattan, and his 45-minute commute from Sheepshead Bay gave him unexpected artistic inspiration.
“Nobody wants to model,” he said.
But on a train, there are models everywhere, often sandwiched together so tightly that they are motionless.
“What else do I with the time? I never saw a lot of faces like this — all different — in Russia,” he says of the city’s mosaic population.
At home he keeps stacks of sketchbooks chronicling the faces of New Yorkers he thought were interesting enough to draw.
“He just loves to do this. He does it just to please the people,” explains his longtime girlfriend, Mila.
Unlike children’s books in America, the ones Modlikskiy illustrated in Russia were filled with images of war. Like those drawings, many of his subway sketches depict sad images of homelessness. Others capture snapshots of daily life on the train as riders sleep, read and listen to music, never knowing they were posing.
Although he initially trained to be a violinist at his mother’s behest, Yuriy knew he had another calling.
“I decided: Myself? I wanted to be an artist,” he says.