50 x 50

Oil on Panel

Shadow Frame

I am as surprised as anyone that I painted a series of trains this past summer. I will tell you WHY I think I did but who ever really knows? I take my third child to school across the James River in Richmond and probably drive across the river 20 times a day in addition to that. If you live in a town with a river bridge with a train crossing it is in your sites that many times a day, I think it just sinks in. Trains are something we all love for the nostalgia of them, and they have such an aura of traveling to new places around them, that they are hard to dismiss. I loved this group of work. The river here is not that blue, and the trains don't really look like that but it really is irrelevant. When I worked on them I was there and wanted to capture the beauty of them. They lend themselves to very minimalist abstraction and I see myself doing more in the future. This painting is the biggest I painted of the bridge series. Somehow a man on a boat got in there. I really do have a tendency to sneak a human element into my paintings whenever I can.