Traintings

The vast majority of what I choose to paint and draw are subjects that catch my eye in day-to-day life. Living in a city with multiple railroad lines running through it and a major train yard, making a painting of a train was likely inevitable. I painted the first Trainting in February of 2025 and have been adding to this series since then. Once the prep work of painting the background and the actual train car is complete, I am faced with an entirely new blank canvas: the side of the train car.

My sketchbooks are chaotic free-for-alls with doodles and the detritus that rattles around my empty little noggin crammed into every available surface. When I sit down in front of a canvas to use up paints and materials, I feel pressure to create something serious and with substance to it. The reason that I love Traintings and plan to continue the series in perpetuity is because when I am faced with the blank side of a train car, conscious and unconscious barriers in my mind come crumbling down. I suddenly give myself permission to just paint all the weird crap, nonsensical phrases and words, cartoon characters, tags I come up with, symbols, niche jokes, stuff I see, things I hear, anything, everything. The meat and taters of tagging freights is having a recognizable name or style that acts as a unifying thread between all of your work. With Traintings, this unifying thread is the series itself. There is no need to revisit the same messages or imagery, every train car is a fresh start where I can experiment and try something new.