This past Christmastime, I traveled back home to California, where I spent many days of wild abandon exploring the southland like I had not since I was a resident, nearly 30 years ago. On a day spent scouring the many wonder-filled features of Downtown LA, I looked down from an overpass I was crossing on Grand Street and spotted this magnificent beast. The curved concrete sculpture features silhouettes of painted steel cars roller-coasting up the structure’s curve. Continue reading Uptown Rocker By Lloyd Hamrol in Downtown Los Angeles→
Trains play a prominent, reoccurring role in Paul Delvaux’s surrealist imagery, including this eerie depiction of two locomotives leaving their terminus at night. Unpopulated, the composition of Small Train Station at Night (1959) invites the viewer to imagine inhabiting the space, this evoking a sense of loneliness and vulnerability. An unnaturally large moon casts the scene in a cool, still light that produces protracted, ominous shadows. These features betray Delvaux’s debt to Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, who likewise explored the train as both subject and symbol in his work.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
