NARRATOR:  

Painter, Deborah Oropallo, talks about Railroad Crossing. 

OROPALLO:  

This painting is part of a series. I originally bought some model railroad tracks at a toy store with my son, and when I got home with the tracks I wasn’t sure how I would paint them. Eventually I just photographed the object straight on a camera and had it photographically transferred to a silk-screen. And with that I just began to print them on the canvas, almost like a woodblock print.  

As a child there was a stretch of railroad tracks that I grew up on, and I’d walk along them with my sister, my older sister, and she would recite this poem that was written by Joyce Kilmer, and it was about the very same stretch of tracks that we were walking along, that went to Suffern, New York, and the poem began– 

Whenever I walk to Suffern 

Along the Erie tracks 

I pass an old farmhouse 

That’s all I can remember. And she would repeat this all the time when we would take this walk, and it was the first time that I realized that art could be about experience, and that it could change how you see the things you know. And that it could also be about very ordinary things. 

I was also very attracted to a sense of infinity that they represented, you know, that when you’d step on them, you could literally look across the country or if you started to walk, you know, you could just go on forever. To me there was an awareness of freedom or a kind of escape. 

In this painting, Railroad Crossing, there a sort of an imaginary kind of travel that takes place or a planned lack of direction. So that if you put a small electric train on this track it should run across, up and down and across the painting. Although there’s no beginning and no ending point. Which would be a kind of implied infinity.