provides a treasure trove of practical techniques and ingenious approaches. In this captivating guide, noted artist
Jane Freeman shows readers, step by step, how to use modified kit components, and found and handmade objects to create intensely detailed miniature constructions.
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April 28, 2006
TRAIN PASSAGES
The journey is the goal, say the sages. So, along the way, are new impressions. A train will float through landscapes of extraordinary imagery, inviting one to succumb to a rare paradox of transience and timelessness. To note--and then note down--passages like these:
I. NY TO PHILADELPHIA (AMTRAK)
We hurtle out of Penn Station (NY). Tints are vivid and shadows rich. The westward sun smacks the factories flat. Under arched stone highways, weeds with palomino manes dance in quirky, gooseflesh ponds. The azure-and-ermine sky turns yellowish fish-eye gray. Spectral white oil tanks like World’s Fair relics slowly wheel by…
Newark… Metropark…Trenton, one by one flash gold domes and charred spires. Between cities lie factories; between factories, fossil-skinned houses misshapen as pinch pots. A pasture of new lumber, laid in A-rows; industrial plants, fixed by neat tense trees and blackboard parking lots with chalked slots…
Spectacular wasteland. Chalice-shaped allsorts mounds (twisted and vivid as sopping wash) reel out continuums of multiplicities: Mount PlasticGallonJug, Mount BlackRubberTire, Mount RustedIronWorks. Soutine-scribble of apricot, ginger, chartreuse foliage. Beneath a glassine sky & pollen-tawny leaves, a moment of madder-red fields, ridged as the roof of a mouth or the grooves of the ocean floor…
So much forest whips by so fast, the colors bleed in spitfire foreground massacres. Through an occasional breach I see (as through a funnel or a tunnel) a fairy-tale farmscape rounding slowly in the distance, like a charm that’s reflected in the deepwood, clairvoyant hand-mirror said to belong to Beauty’s Beast.
II. NY TO MATWAN (NJ TRANSIT)
Twenty-minute chug through landfill hills of yellow grass basted with green copper cables. Poles arranged in groups, like Calvary. An empty armature of dispirited billboard scaffolds propped against a newsprint sky. Power lines suture the ozone, as intricate as Klee drawings or cat’s-cradle twine. A tableau of gas-belching, combustible structures in stricken industrial cities: Elizabeth…Bethune…. Monstrous depopulated refineries with scum-lidded, multi-mullioned windows (cracked ajar in dusty rhombuses, glinting in the glowering sun. Stalky white towers with spiral stairs like nobbed spines; knolls of shattered glass; car parts packed in scintillate cubes…
The black bridge skyway—leviathan roller-coaster, something from Bladerunner (antediluvian & futuristic)--cradles our tonnage in surreal embrace: complex of black X’s, galaxy of girders. We hang over a viscous river that’s rife with effluvia, and ominously roiling in dun corrugations...
At Penn Station (Newark), we wait for the Matawan train. In the tracks: rusted stakes, spikes, lath. Birds clamor in riveted station rafters. The new train scrapes in, chuffs us off through another linkage of idle, old, empty towns. On the pallid vista, acid-yellow forsythia imposes its intrusion of blooms. The willows, thinking about coming into leaf, trail sparse tresses like pickle-juice tearstains. Describo ergo sum. I sit back, lullabuoyed along hilly raillands; coast over Lilliputia; muse on what I might find in Matawan, to furnish a private micro-world of my begetting.
Posted by Jane on April 28, 2006 8:03 PM
