Railroad Crossing is fine art for sale

Railroad Trestle is a landscape painting for sale by the Fine Art Gallery of Realism.

In this landscape, a railroad crossing can be seen in the foreground, crossing the painting from left to right. The nearer warning sign rises up beyond the top of the canvas while the other is in full view. The road runs straight into the horizon, rising as it climbs a hill in the distance. A side road comes in from the right and a small car sits at the intersection waiting to cross the road as another car approaches from the distance. Ahead of the distant car, a tall oak tree stands on the roadside.

This painting was a part of a number I did in a distant suburb from where I lived. Unlike the others that I painted, I wanted to try something different and use photographic cropping tools to decide how I wanted to arrange this scene. Instead of just setting up my canvas and sketching out the view, I shot photos and brought them back to my computer to be viewed and scaled. I liked the scene but I was using a canvas with less vertically and wanted to see how I could crop the scene to fit the canvas. I was also looking for ways to play with the painting’s arrangements.

Although the view seems rather peaceful, it is an area that is losing its privacy to a growing number of subdivisions and the roads are becoming much more traveled. If you wait, another car or two should be coming shortly.

Generally, landscapes are horizontal. Unless you are in the mountains or in the forest, a landscape painter is left with a sky to deal with, so any verticality that can be found is a benefit to a landscape painting. Street lights, tall trees, billboards, skyscrapers and railroad warning signs all provide some height and upper visual interest in a landscape painting. So can clouds, if you can get an interesting sky to work with.

This painting was routine artistic creative inspiration for myself. I painted the horizon first, brought forward the road and filled in the countryside. My worst enemy painting is my patience. All of the motionless items are fairly quick to paint but cars, people and skies take a while before you find something that you may prefer. If I have other parts of the painting to work on, I do that while I wait. Sometimes I even read, waiting for the right car of the right pattern of clouds to appear. I had way too many sunny, cloudless days while working on this picture and it took a while to find a sky of interest. I have been known to just paint the sky at home, waiting in my back yard for something unique to appear, but in this case, I got a series of small puffy clouds passing over and I took advantage of them.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting