Penn Central No. 4715 at the Illinois Railway Museum

Penn Central No. 4715, 10 x 14 inch watercolor by George C. Clark   PRINT AVAILABLE

When I started going out to the Illinois Railway Museum with my watercolors and sketchbook on a pretty regular basis back about 15 years ago, this was one of the earliest paintings I did in what has turned out to be my Age of Iron series.  I was especially attracted to this big green cab-centered electric locomotive because its shape reminded me of the big old black Lionel electric locomotive that originally belonged to my father that he let me play with when I was a kid.  Somewhere there is a photo of the train set up under a Christmas tree dated 1921 on the back.  My father would have been 11 that year.  That Lionel got pretty banged up in my care-- my father scored much higher as a loving parent than he did as a conservator of collectables.

In those days No. 4715 was kept outdoors, and I painted it on a sunny summer day.  I had to squeeze back in-between two locomotives parked on a parallel track to get this view.  Even so, I got a little more fish-eye lens type distortion on No. 4715's cab than I was happy with.  I corrected that with Photoshop to produce the image above.  This corrected version is only available as a print.

Since I painted this more train sheds have been built at IRM and this locomotive is displayed indoors now, where visitors can see it from walkways between the rails.  Although as a rail fan I am happy it is now being protected from the weather, as an artist I find the new display a little too dark and claustrophobic to paint, even with its illumination from skylights and electric lights.

At the Mid-Continent Railway Museum in North Freedom, Wisconsin

Iron Range No. 29, 14 x 10 inch ink, watercolor and colored pencil drawing by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

I sketched No. 29 in July up in Wisconsin.  Recently I finished the drawing, adding color and the Milwaukee Road track inspection car on a parallel track in the foreground. 

An Early Experiment

The Locomotive, 9 x 11 inch stone block lithograph by George C. Clark  AVAILABLE
(#6 from a signed and numbered edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs)

Back in the 1970s I experimented with various printmaking media.  I studied etching and woodcut and linoleum cut techniques with Howard Albert at the Pauper's Press in Chicago.  BettyAnn Mocek taught me a photomechanical process to make silkscreen prints from black-and-white line art at Evanston Art Center.  To learn stone block and metal plate lithography I went to a printmakers' collective where Bill Cass taught techniques and rented studio time for me to use the presses.  

The first thing Bill taught me was how to remove an earlier image from a litho stone and grind the surface smooth to accept my new image.  When my stone was ready, Bill did a little demonstration on another stone of how you could make marks with litho pencils and crayons and liquid litho inks in various ways to get different effects.  After he printed his block, he invited me to have a go at the block I had prepared and try the techniques he had showed me.

I hadn't prepared anything or given much thought to subject matter, but I didn't want to waste my laboriously-prepared stone on random lines or squiggles, so I took a litho pencil and started to draw an image I pulled out of my head.  It turned out to be this vaguely British old-fashioned steam locomotive.  I tried adding tones with various scribbling and hatching methods, drew with and without a straightedge, applied ink with a brush as well as spattered from a toothbrush, and made smoke by rubbing dry litho pigment into the stone with a soft cloth.  Finally I made some white streaks by scraping back into the stone with a steel tool.  When we proofed the result, I was pleased enough with it to get some buff-colored Stonehenge paper and print an edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs.  I had only saved one of these prints, but I recently inherited #6 when a relative I had gifted it to decades ago passed away.

This is not my first piece a railroad art, but it predates my formal AGE OF IRON series by almost 20 years.