My husband and I collect Marklin HO trains, the best company who make them, coming from Germany but we collect the American trains, in this case, the box top from an HO Digital Premium Starter 2 Trans Set, STEAM Big Boy Union Pacific and Super Chief F7—plus cargo and passenger cars! I like how on the box, “Start” as part of “Starter” was declared so prominently on it, and all the graphic elements landed into a surreal landscape of a made-up train coming out of a tunnel in a toy world that resembled our own real world. Thinking of the industrial revolution that led us on the track to where we are today (but also in ’05, with 9-11 still very much on my mind, having been in NYC and teaching literally during that tragedy), and the dystopia of the W. Bush era and the War on Terror that ended up starting all the prolonged conflicts of America’s longest war.

But I was also thinking of the great masterpiece by Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway, where the hare is trying to outrun the steam engine barreling toward us in the rain. I love this painting, and feel it has everything about man vs. nature, industrial progress but also the inherent negative aspects about technology exceeding the growth of the country—and the proletariat.

With global warming ravaging the world, even more than when I originally painted this in ’05, the surrealism of the landscape, as I’m painting my thoughts as much as projecting my unconscious onto the image, comes true. I’ve thought that subconsciously, it’s as if the back of a head, shoulders, and arms of a skeletal figure is looking onto the train, and behind the train, a fiery landscape appears with figures, almost like ghosts, emerging, the graphic on the right almost like an ax coming to chop through the oncoming trains. In the side of the trains seem like seascapes or like a red feather coming through a sky background, instead of the signage that originally appeared there. I love visionary poetry, and Cézanne, and like how Cézanne would project upon a landscape and his innermost thoughts come out unconsciously realized on the picture plane, hopefully my own dreams and nightmares project through what I’m gazing upon while I paint that give it visionary verve. Hopefully we aren’t on the speeding train toward apocalypse, and painting for me is also about warning the world to slow down to save ourselves and the planet.