New Class for Modern Travel 2, (The Cincinnatian).

Steam.  A study of steam, movement, emotion and motion.

Flying Presedent

Movement is an extremely important element in getting across what I am trying to say in my paintings.  So often, I loose sight of that, and I become too focused on the train instead of the reasons for painting it.  

Water Spout Landscape

Copyright N.Emerson 2012.  This painting has been SOLD

The train paintings are about desire, dreams, ambition, love and longing, this painting does all of that, with the use of color and impermanent qualities.  There are elements of my more realistic work, but  also elements of the more abstract.  In this, it all came together to make what I consider to be a very successful painting.

Around the Table

Two steam engines wait for their duties on the tracks that radiate from a turn table.  Seeming peaceful, they are actually powerful beasts of iron, steal, fire, water and steam that will soon be moving at speeds close to '80 mph.The locomotive in the foreground represents another NYC Hudson.

I have started messing around with fall scenes.  Once again, I am trying to depict, not only the train, but the shear power and bruit force behind the steam locomotive.  This Lakawanna Pocono type locomotive is swinging around a elevated curve with a freight train. I have spent some time up near Scranton PA, and this scene is very much like what you might have seen standing track side back in the 1940s.   I feel this painting is very successful at blending realism and abstraction.  It is a very realistic scene, but I'm trying to stay loose.  I keep the one hair brush tucked away for special occasions.

Passing

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.