David Swanson had already established himself as a contemporary realist painter when he decided to go back to school to get his Bachelor of Fine Arts. He wanted to paint in a more figurative direction, and he felt that the formal discipline offered by a degree program would strengthen his preparation and foundation for exploring new directions. On a recent visit to David’s studio, we talked about the new work, art in general, and the things that brought him to Montana, and finally to Livingston, to stay.

As a former gallery director, I’ve read more than a few artist statements that gamefully try (but don’t always succeed) to convey what the painter is trying to do, or has done. But I found an immediate understanding and growing engagement as David used words to talk about what he has done with paint. The man is articulate; and the variety of work in his studio is a treat for the eyes.

Having already painted outside what he referred to as the Holy Trinity of much of western art–“wildlife, cowboys/Indians, and landscape”–David has gone a step farther in embracing new subject matter and composition. As we talked, I found myself going back again and again to several of the paintings that David is working on now.

On one easel is a painting of a railroad worker at the Livingston locomotive repair shop. The wheels and axle assembly (if I have my train terms right) are on a lift overhead, and the figure is squared off directly underneath, his arms raised to work on it. Awaiting more work are two other railroad paintings, one in which we look up to a worker crouched beside what looks like an engine compartment (there’s heat in there), leaning in to take a look. In the third, a worker is beside a locomotive unhooking a massive steel part from the cable used to lower it into place. The Montana Rail Link locomotive is behind him. He is muscled and wearing overalls and a hard hat. It’s enough to make a girl who grew up with regular views of Boardman Robinson’s figurative “History of Commerce” murals (commissioned for a Pittsburgh department store) weep for joy. [The three paintings, shown in progress, are “Locomotive Mechanic,” “Chaining up a Truck,” and “Night Inspection.”]

While I sit here wishing I had asked more about the names of locomotive parts, let me say that it is really beside the point. The paintings are about men and the machines they tend, and that is enough to appreciate them, their colors, their large forms brought into an intimate perspective, their humanity. “Tend” is David’s word for it. “We’ve gone through the steam age, the jet age, the space age, and we’re now in the digital age, and still these locomotives are with us. We still rely on them, and still spend a lot of time tending them.”

David spent some time watching these men who tend the locomotives. He visited the repair shop after going through the difficult process of gaining access (Homeland Security has made that more challenging), and he asked permission of the men who he would base his paintings on. “Based on” is the operative expression. David’s figures are neither specific enough to delay our gaze with questions of identity, nor so much of a type that we lose interest in them.

How the railroad paintings came to be reveals David’s process. He begins by photographing the subject, sometimes quite spontaneously, and in the locomotive repair shop case, in black and white. “It’s sometimes less free to work with a color photo,” he tells me. From the photograph, David makes a drawing “to get my hand into the project one more time.” And the drawing gives him a sense of the proportions he’ll be working with. Next he draws a grid. He mentions that he never uses photo projection, and its clear from the way he says it that the method is not for him.

He says the task is mathematical, but by that he certainly doesn’t mean the work is purely technical. He shows me a much-handled copy of the Architectural Graphic Standards that he refers to for things like the proportions of railroad track, and he seems as passionately interested in the rightness of shapes and proportions as he is about applying paint, or the art of Edward Hopper, a painter whom he admires.

The last step before applying paint to canvas is to build the canvas itself. “It’s all about vantage point, what you are going to show. I build my canvases based on the composition.” Having made his living at one time as an architectural illustrator, he says that “the importance of getting the viewer into the space was quickly evident.” The right vantage point is “what [I] love about Hopper.” Another much-handled book appears and we look at Edward Hopper’s “Office At Night,” a painting (at right) that does indeed stimulate discussion about vantage point.

And that leads me back to looking at David’s new works, which have already gotten me “into the space” again and again. David describes how his earlier work, specifically his well known painting of the Shields Valley grain elevator, combined the “geometrical and the organic” with the grain elevator and the landscape, and how the newer work is switching the emphasis toward the organic. The work is figurative, man and machine, but the figure is as compelling as the machine, and in proportion. “Man in relation to ships is outscaled,” he says. “Man in relation to locomotives is not.”

It’s curious that with the railroad yards being so much a part of Livingston, local painters have not done more with the subject. For David, it is a key part of why he came here. “I love living in Livingston. Both Gillian [David’s wife] and I share an empathy for railroad towns. I like it that the railroad is a primary part of Livingston.”

As for me, I like it that David Swanson, still defying that trinity, and finding new directions as a painter, is making paintings that I can’t stop looking at–the colors, the brushstrokes, and of course the figures, and the simultaneous intimacy and power of men tending locomotives. I think it’s fine with the artist that I’m distracted by his paintings while we talk: “The relationship of the subject and viewer is what it’s all about.”

Others of the new paintings, not about the railyards, are also compelling, and as space forbids describing them all here, I can only hope we’ll see all of them exhibited soon. David has plans to update his Web site: davidswansonart.com, and hopefully the new images will be shown there, too.

Filed under: Articles/Interviews, Art Talk