Belmar and the Railroad

We're now well into the new year.  My college schedule is starting to come together.  It's time to start thinking about making some new art.  But before I could sit down and start thinking about my next print I was asked to take on a new project, coordinating a local exhibition.  The BAC announced its 2014 gallery schedule, which includes a show called Belmar and the Railroad.  Belmar and the shore have been served by train for many decades, and it's certainly had an impact on the region as tourist destination and as a home for commuters.  Last fall I participated in a competition to design a mural for the 80 foot length of the train station.  They ended up choosing a professional muralist from outside the area who works in a common contemporary process of painting it on a flexible surface which will be attached to the building later, which makes sense considering paint doesn't dry well in the cold and the busy train station platform may be a tough place to paint a large mural.  The plan is to start painting that mural (indoors) later this month and have it installed and dedicated in April.  This train themed show will be put together with some contributions from the Belmar Historical Society and will coincide with the mural's debut.

So why was I tapped?  The BAC is all volunteers, so someone has to get these things done.  Our trustees and board members get that task a lot and they can always use a break.  I show as much as anyone in the organization, have assisted on several shows, and impressed some people with how I helped organize last year's JAS8 winners show, which featured my Fourth of July series.  Plus, it was remembered that my unused mural proposal devoted far more space to the subject of the train than any other one.  (the idea of including a train in a mural on the train station shouldn't be that unusual, but whatever)  So this made me the closest thing they have to a train artist.

And perhaps I am.  I certainly wouldn't call them a focus of my work, but they do pop up.  Although no one there had remembered this, that Fourth series has at least four prints that include train imagery.  And also last year I showed a print in a different show that was a scene on our local train.  Trains have appeared in at least one other print I know I showed there.  I even have an individual train themed print from my Birds and Seeds series sitting in a frame, ready for this upcoming show.  I graduated from three schools and currently work at another that all have train stations within blocks of the campuses.

So I agreed.  As part of this they want me to design a postcard/poster for the show.  In the traditional sense I am the organization's one true graphic artist (all this digital stuff ain't art as far as I'm concerned) and with my long interest in trains this should be in my wheelhouse.  My first instinct was vintage train posters, and I happen to have a few saved calendars (above) from last decade with that theme.  Not going to copy anything, but I just thought that seeing the various painterly, precisionist, art deco, etc designs might be inspirational in creating my own advertisement.  Trains are also a big part of fine art of the same period.  Trains are featured on the first three pages (below) of Passionate Journey, my favorite woodcut novel by my woodcut hero Frans Masereel.

The Italian Futurists loved machines as subjects and inspirations, and the two page spread in my college Modern Art textbook on this movement includes two paintings with trains as subjects, one each from Boccioni and Severini.  I brought all this stuff to a meeting at the Boatworks a few days ago, along with my bound copy of the Fourth of July (I'm not going to set up individual links, but if you want to see the train prints, go to the dedicated blog and use the archives to look up July 8th,  August 4th, and June 3rd and 18th) and a newly produced color rendering of a current train engine based on the one I did for the mural last fall, minus the building architecture.

Part of the meeting was to discuss specifics like dates and business parts of the show, and part was to discuss the card art.  We decided that the futurist style would be appreciated by a lot of artists, but probably confuse a lot of the general public.  The black and white woodcut examples I had brought I had already eliminated- I love that kind of stuff but they've a bit more crude than the look we want.  What we decided was to start with an approaching locomotive again, and then to modernize it a bit.  Simplify shapes and colors, play up the geometry, but don't let it get too abstract.  And they want me to do it as a woodcut, which is fine since that is the way my art looks best.

The plan is to have my art done by the beginning of February, so the image (plus digitally added text for show titles, etc) can be used to create the card and posters and give us plenty of time to promote it.  I've been thinking about it for the past few days, and today in between various school related stuff I did the above sketch.  I had several photos of the train coming and going from Belmar's station.  A long side view was the logical choice to fill a big section of that 80' wall, but for this much smaller card I think I'm going to go with a more angled view, which also allows some of the station architecture to be in view.  The way the light hits the angles in this view also plays up the modernist geometric shapes better.  I like what I'm seeing so far, so I think the next step is to cut a piece of wood to right proportion and start working out the drawing.