The Way to LA
1994
Mixed media on canvas
8" x 8"
20.3cm x 20.3cm
About the work
A fisheye-distorted view down the aisle of a train car, painted from a sketch made during an Amtrak trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1994 — one of the artist's first solo trips outside San Francisco. The warm, tunnel-like interior of the train — curved ceiling ribs, receding seat-backs — frames a single rounded, lens-like window opening onto a cooler, brighter landscape of rolling green hills, oak trees, a golden rocky outcrop, and blue sky. The window's shape, rather than the landscape or interior, was the driving compositional element; the surrounding scene was constructed to support that shape rather than transcribed from direct observation. The fisheye logic derives from skate-video visual memory rather than any camera or photographic reference — consistent with the perspective language running through the artist's other 1993–96 oils.
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Vision Analysis
A fisheye-distorted view down the interior aisle of a train car, oil on canvas, 8" x 8". The vehicle's structure — ceiling ribs, seat-backs receding on both sides, the aisle floor — bows outward in a barrel-like curve consistent with wide-angle/fisheye lens logic. At center, a single window is rendered not as a rectangle but as a rounded, elongated oval, almost eye- or lens-shaped, outlined in warm yellow-ochre. Through it: rolling green hills, scattered oak trees, a golden-brown rocky outcrop, and a blue sky with white clouds and small distant birds. The interior is rendered in warm browns and umbers, tunnel-like and enclosing, contrasting with the cooler blues and greens of the landscape glimpsed through the window. The vantage is centered and symmetrical, looking straight down the aisle. Signed 'B.'94' lower right.
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