After completing the painting "Pennsylvania Dawn", I started to work on this painting. I tried to implement the same technique that I had used in PA Dawn. For the most part, the small brush is gone. Most of the small details are now done with a larger brush. I used to be extremely detail oriented, and the paintings were all about the small brush and the smooth blending. Now, the paintings are no longer about intense detail but more about the overall feeling... yet, somehow, they are more realistic. Creating them has become more about the color and working with observation than about specific detail. The human brain fills in the detail and eye movement carries the viewer through the world I've created.
In 2002 I was doing similar paintings that were 4"x3"... Notice that is 4 inches and not 4 feet!!! These were very small paintings that could fit in a coat pocket. I could not figure out how to translate them into bigger work. Now, finally I have tapped into some of the magic of those little paintings in slightly larger scale.
These new paintings are all a very decent wall hanging size. Big enough to be seen, but small enough that they don't overwhelm. This one is about 18 x 24 inches, as an example.
So the paintings have taken on a slightly more historical quality, as I start painting real scenes, (or scenes that could have happened), as apposed to paintings of locomotives with totally abstracted backgrounds. I am not trying, however, to simply reproduce a moment from the nostalgic past, rather I'm trying to capture something in the mood with my choice of subject matter composition and palate. While the locomotives are still the main characters in my painted dramas, it has now become about the whole scene, (more so).
In this scene, we see a Norfolk and Western class A 2-6-6-4 passing a coal mine where another N&W articulated engine is waiting with a string of coal hoppers, taking on loads from the mine. The weather is cool and humid, with the two steam engines producing nice white steam in the crisp air. True to the N&W, a minimum of black smoke is being produced. The N&W was very strict about the over usage of coal, and publicity photos rarely show an N&W steamer producing thick black smoke. When O. Winston Link took his famous photographs of the N&W, he was asked not to use pictures of the locomotives that showed too much black smoke. Of course, it was unavoidable to photograph coal burning steam engines without some black smoke some of the time.
