Why art?
Latest item at KSHS is another lost railroad depot. It's described as a depot at Menoken, which is now more or less subsumed within Topeka. Menoken Road is the exact western boundary of Topeka, and Googlemaps indicates the name at a blank location just west of there on 24. The UP railroad still runs through the location, with a number of small structures scattered along the track.

This picture is artistically interesting. It's not a photo of the depot. It seems to be a black and white photo made in 1931, of a watercolor painting of the depot. I'm guessing that the watercolor started with a tracing or projection of a photo, because there are some exact lines and some imagined lines. The imagined shadings are especially interesting. The painter clearly knew the place. He showed the stationmaster casually leaning in the doorway waiting for the next train, and he suggested windowshades in the various rooms. You can 'see' the interior better than you could from a direct photograph.

In other words, the artist caught the soul and life of the place in a way that no photograph could.

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I'm thinking about this for a specific reason. I got enamored of those little depots and decided to make some digital models, to keep busy between the hurryups and the waits in courseware debug. I've made three models, and I'm NOT happy with the soul and life of the third one. My model ended up with more normal proportions of doors and walls and windows, completely losing the uniqueness of the original.

Here's the original:



It has the same T-shape as most middle-size depots, but reduced to an absolute minimum size. It's CUTE.

Here's my model so far:



The proportions are more normal, more appropriate for a bungalow. The minimality is lost, and with it the cuteness.

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Later: I've pulled the proportions closer to the original, but it still doesn't hit the mark for some reason.



Time to move forward, make some other pieces for the set, and then return to this one.

Labels: defensible times

  ¶ 3:51 PM