Beauty in the Abandoned: Valeri Larko
Written by Antonina Shklyar
Published on July 17th, 2025
What happens to a building after it’s abandoned? For most of the world, the answer is decay, silence, and erasure. But for painter Valeri Larko, abandonment is just the beginning. In the forgotten corners of urban landscapes–where others see graffiti-covered ruins– she sees living, breathing creativity. Her paintings of the Glenwood Power Plant capture not only what it looks like, but the vibrant subculture that brings it to life.
Valeri Larko started out painting industrial landscapes, many of which included signage. She says; “I really liked the signage and lettering in my paintings, but it wasn’t graffiti.” It wasn’t until she moved from New Jersey to the Bronx that she was exposed to high levels of graffiti within an urban setting.
“I really liked the signage and lettering in my paintings, but it wasn’t graffiti.”
Larko grew up in Lake Parsippany and spent most of her life in Northern New Jersey, surrounded by sprawling highways, strip malls and industrial parks. This environment deeply shaped her interest in built landscapes. After studying at the DuCret School of the Arts and the Art Students League in New York, she eventually relocated to an artist loft in New Rochelle in 2004, where she turned her attention to the gritty, layered edges of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.
Her delve into painting graffiti began with one building on West Farms Road in the Bronx. “This is one of the first buildings that really captured my imagination. That’s kind of how I got into the graffiti – this building, because it was so big and had so much going on that I did a whole series here.”
Valeri’s Glenwood Power Plant paintings have more graffiti than even the building on West Farms Road. Valeri had heard of the Glenwood power plant before, but hadn’t known how to enter until she heard from OBA, an UrbEx photographer. “Once I went there, it was magical,” she says.
“Once I went there, it was magical.”
The Glenwood Power Plant was built as a coal-burning power plant in 1906 by architectural company Reed&Stem, most famous for designing Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. It was used by the railroad firm to power the adjacent railroad, which is now Metro-North’s Glenwood station. The power plant was decommissioned and sold to ConEdison in 1936, but wasn’t fully abandoned until 1963.
According to Valeri, “Since then, it’s gone through a couple of owners but no one’s ever really done anything with it. What’s really interesting about this place is that it’s a creative mecca. The graffiti is just one element.” Valeri has encountered musicians, filmmakers, photographers, drone-operators, urban wildlife, highliners, and even the Yonkers Firemen on their annual calendar photoshoot.
Visually, the space is dominated by graffiti. It’s an informal permission wall of sorts, where hundreds of artists (new and established alike) have practiced leaving their mark. The towering walls and soaring ceilings are covered; from small tags to huge, multi-dimensional lettering.
From her experience painting abandoned, graffiti-covered sites, Valeri discovered that “these places have this afterlife that is rich and full, and that could live no place else but in an amazing abandoned site like this. And that’s what makes it so interesting, not just the graffiti– that’s cool, but you see graffiti in a lot of different places–but for this to be the backdrop for so many other forms of art is what I found fascinating.”
“That’s what makes it so interesting, not just the graffiti– that’s cool, but you see graffiti in a lot of different places–but for this to be the backdrop for so many other forms of art is what I found fascinating.”
Her draw to these overlooked and decaying places stems from a desire to tell the quiet stories which exist at the fringes of modern life–rusted industrial skeletons, aging overpasses and forgotten lots where nature and humanity intermingle in strange and poetic ways. For Larko, these aren’t just ruins. They’re aging records of how we’ve shaped our environment and how it, in turn, continues to change.
In one of Valeri’s larger paintings from the series, a buff-colored tabby named Buffy sits in the grass in front of the power plant. Named after Buff Monster, Buffy, a member of Glenwood’s urban wildlife, was a spontaneous addition. Valeri made friends with him when she first began the series: “he would come and get pretty close to me and just sit and watch me…and I took a few pictures just because I thought he was really cute, and then I said you know, I need a bit of a focal point and so I added him.”
Buffy the cat is an example of how painting on-site influences Valeri’s work. Rather than working primarily from photographs, she commits herself to painting outdoors on location. She often spends months on a single site–-returning again and again to capture the changing light and atmosphere. Her process begins with quick pen-and-ink sketches, followed by oil studies that help her refine the composition before committing to a larger canvas.
For Valeri’s major oil paintings, she will do a color study first. This ensures that she is happy with the composition before she orders custom-made stretchers bars and stretches the large linen canvas. Both her studies and large canvases are painted on site. She’ll often juggle two paintings per day–one in the morning and one in the afternoon–adjusting to the shifts in sunlight. When needed, she’ll finish details in the studio, tweaking color values and edges so that the final piece looks just as striking indoors as it did in nature.
While challenging, painting on-location is richly rewarding. The process of immersing herself in a space–not just visually, but physically and socially–allows her to build a layered understanding of her subject. Valeri chats with locals, listens to their stories, and learns the informal histories of these forgotten places. Wind, sun, curious passersby and even stray cats become part of the texture of her experience, and, ultimately, her art.
“I hope that just being there and being able to really experience it comes through in the painting.”
“I hope that just being there and being able to really experience it comes through in the painting. To me, it’s not just the place, it’s the people that I meet and that I talk to, they inform what I do and influence what I do, to a lesser degree. But like Buffy here, it’s just getting fully immersed in a place rather than if I took some photographs and went home. It wouldn’t be the same experience.”
Another cool feature of the Glenwood Power Plant series are the hidden tags that Valeri hides within her paintings. Valeri’s tag, Ruby 87, is named for her previous dog, Ruby, and the house number in which they lived together. Valeri’s current dog (an adorable red-nosed pitbull) is named Tula. “I add Tula now as well as Ruby. If there’s graffiti in my paintings it’s kind of like where’s Waldo; you gotta look sometimes, it’s not as obvious, but I put them in every one.”
Through layers of graffiti, hidden tags and unexpected muses (like Buffy), Valeri’s work honors both the ephemeral and the enduring. In her hands, the abandoned becomes immortal, for what it was but also for what it continues to be: a canvas of collective expression, alive with art, memory, and presence.
Antonina Shklyar is a student, artist and writer. When she isn’t working, she likes long runs, sketching and petting her dogs.