This painting really belongs in my cityscape series but it has become one of those muses that has to this date been unresolved. It has in my mind numerous outcomes each with very different pictorial and narrative possibilities. I only include it to describe how I sometimes approach a subject.
It was a scene of personal narrative. I was sitting on a rather lonely subway platform late at night have dined with a client in the Tokyo suburbs. I was looking to catch a train into central Tokyo and rather idly snapped this picture of exhausted yet stolid commuters going home. It was only later that I realised it had an almost Hopperesque quality of loud silence.
The painting is made on board and the dark area is cut out to a depth of 6mm, the effect being to freeze the frame of the train between the illusion of the scene (the painted forms) and the artifice of the painting on the board. The rest however has yet to be decided!
It was a scene of personal narrative. I was sitting on a rather lonely subway platform late at night have dined with a client in the Tokyo suburbs. I was looking to catch a train into central Tokyo and rather idly snapped this picture of exhausted yet stolid commuters going home. It was only later that I realised it had an almost Hopperesque quality of loud silence.
The painting is made on board and the dark area is cut out to a depth of 6mm, the effect being to freeze the frame of the train between the illusion of the scene (the painted forms) and the artifice of the painting on the board. The rest however has yet to be decided!
DETAIL
POSSIBILITIES
THE LAST TRAIN HOME. Acrylic