Industry and art, in sullen counterpoint, cohabit on prime real estate but uninterestedly go about divergent lives. It is to watch this that I am drawn to these blocks, again and again. It will not last. Already, fashion is slithering in

The Saturday gallery hop has become a New York activity as popular as brunch or a walk in the park, notices Natalie de Souza, as sleek girls with perfect tresses, men with large nostrils and glossy older couples with an acquisitive air, stroll by on an autumn evening.

The colours of Jaisalmer glow in the entrance of an art gallery on 25th Street. A desert palette of pale gold sandstone and dusty blue sky, punctuated somewhere in the distance by the bright red slash of a sari, is abstracted, here in Chelsea, into three person-sized blocks of stone, essence of orange and blue and the reddest of red, an intense distillate of my memories of western Rajasthan. It’s more like Jaisalmer on acid, to tell you the truth, or on a large bhang lassi perhaps. The blocks are the work of London-based artist, Kate Dineen, apprentice for over a decade to craftsman, Gyarsilal Varma in Baroda and Jaipur and have been created by the method of Jaipuri fresco painting or Araash. In a process almost unbelievably laborious in our channel-hopping, web-surfing, instant-gratification world, the practitioner of Araash mixes marble dust, slaked lime and pigment into a wet cement that is applied, in up to 18 layers, to wall or plaster. As it dries, the paste hardens back to something akin to rock itself, now bonded to the wall that it adorns and durable enough, presumably, to withstand punishing Rajasthani sunshine and sand-laced desert wind. There are perhaps 15 blocks mounted on the clean white walls of the gallery on 25th Street, each a concentrated nugget of a single glorious colour. They seem lit from within. In the best of them – and I return again and again to the red – the colour knows something about itself that it isn’t quite telling, some secret to which are perhaps privy only the synaesthetic, the poets and the slightly mad. Kate has said that she seals each block with coconut oil. I sniff but there is nothing, not even the scent of the rock.

On this occasion, I’ve been made cheerful by the Araash, by its exuberant colour and by the thought of a traditional Indian method rendered modern at the edge of the contemporary scene, but the best part of a jaunt through Chelsea is often not the art at all. The area beyond 10th Avenue at the western fringe of Manhattan has become, since some time in the ’90s, the display case of the downtown art world. But, unlike other parts of this city, Greenwich Village, say, or Midtown, western Chelsea still feels very much in transition.

At the eastern end of the area are the rusting tracks, some ten or 15 metres above the ground, of the High Line, a now defunct elevated train that ran from 1933 to 1980. Near-fossilised remains of the city’s industrial past, the tracks run, impossibly, right through many of the buildings in their path, an arrangement that once made for easy delivery of the freight that the train moved, during the Depression and World War II and the booming years post-war, along the western edge of New York. With characteristic abruptness, the street changes entirely once you walk under the tracks. Brownstones switch to warehouses, flowers to flaking rust, gentility to barbed wire and the whiff of times gone by. At the other end of the block, a wall of cars rushes along the West Side highway. A more modern boundary, but with the Hudson, timeless, beyond. In between are the galleries, stark, airy white rooms, yawning into the featureless warehouse buildings of this once distinctly working-class part of town. The buildings are not very high but they are solid, built for storage and industry, mostly of a dark brick that comes to life only briefly at sundown, in the transient slanting rays of an affectionate sun.

Cheek by jowl with the galleries, even today, are auto repair joints and towing services, peopled by dark-skinned men with grease on their hands, where exposed metal pipes and riots of wiring are both reason for existence and source of cash and not, as in many of their neighbours, an embrace of the industrial aesthetic that is, more often than not, strained. A dank garage on 21st Street houses crippled taxis, nose to tail. In the brilliant windows flanking it, as I walk past, men in black clothes and platform shoes stand and watch shifting shapes on a flatscreen, insulated in their shining cocoon from the smells of petrol and chicken curry and the laughter of the mechanics next door. Industry and art, in sullen counterpoint, cohabit on prime real estate but uninterestedly go about divergent lives, and it is to watch this that I am drawn to walk these blocks, again and again. It will not last. Already, fashion is slithering in. Balenciaga beckons pinkly opposite the Alcamo Marble Works on 22nd Street. The glowing wormhole leading to Commes des Garcons is only a few doors up, improbably crowned with a sign for ‘Heavenly Body Works Expert Auto Collision Repair and Refinishing’, re-assuring the less-than-heavenly-bodied amongst us, I suppose, that had we the means, expert repair and refinishing in the form of designer duds is not entirely out of reach.

The Saturday gallery hop has become a New York activity as popular as brunch or a walk in the park and the varied sorts strolling by me in the golden light, this autumn evening, are a reflection of this. There are sleek girls with perfect tresses and artsy girls with tousled hair and chiselled girls with green hair. There are many hats, at angles awkward or rakish. There are men with large nostrils and ponytails, long hair thinning on top, eyeing the girls even more than they do the pictures at the exhibitions. There are families with babies, glossy older couples with a slow tread and an acquisitive air and a trio of beautiful sprites who, one suspects, have spent the morning being wicked with one another. There is an elderly lady, with the grace and also the dimensions of an old sailing ship, elaborately turbaned, examining a floor-to-ceiling collage of naked women and Tweety Bird. Skin like fine porcelain, she has, but thrown into a thousand little lines as she masticates – only in America! – a piece of chewing gum.

The hush as you step off the street into the soaring galleries at street level is slight, but palpable. No doubt this is elicited sometimes by the art but much more consistently so by the massive dimensions, the sheer volume of empty space enclosed within these walls. A huge white room with almost nothing in it, in this cramped and rushing town, seems to have about it a sense of the sacred. But, I am nevertheless disappointed today. Apart from Kate Dineen’s Araash and one clever representation of a vending machine selling hearts and skin grafts and other assorted organs at futuristically throwaway prices, I have been left categorically indifferent. It sometimes seems that as long as the room is big enough and the lights bright enough, the most meaningless psychedelic mishmash or silly semi-pornography or three drops of ink on the torn-out page of a notebook, can pass for art worth looking at. If there is only one object on a glorious white wall, the reasoning seems to go, then it must be worth some attention, musn’t it?

But then I step out into the street and the sun has gone and the wind is up off the river. The neon on the highway is beginning to live and the High Line is stark and old against a deepening sky. Dark brick is raffish in the lamplight. People walk more briskly now but I amble still, the aftertaste of mediocre paintings falling quickly, in the accidental beauty of dusk in Chelsea, away.

[Verve contributor, Natalie de Souza is a scientist, born in Mumbai and living in New York City. She works at Columbia University on the development of the microscopic worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. When she is not in the lab, she reads and writes and walks the endlessly fascinating New York streets.]