04/20/2023 | 6m 26s | Video has closed captioning.
Bellevue-based artist J. Craig Thorpe has spent the past 30 years creating railroad and landscape artwork viewed by millions. Thorpe’s work has been featured nationwide in AMTRAK marketing materials, National Park Service brochures, and in museums across the country. He shares his insights on the connections between transportation, community and culture.
Aired: 04/20/23
>> The following is a presentation of KBTC Profiles.
>> I think like an artist.
I see things differently.
I'm drawn into the subject matter, yet I don't try to paint like a camera sees.
Detail is expressive.
It helps draw the viewer in.
These paintings leave room around the edges, so the viewer can get into the work.
I want my art to say not what is this painting of, but I want the viewer to say, what is this painting about?
What's it like when I get into it?
It's about connections, and about hopes and about dreams.
That's the question.
Where did this train come from?
Where's it going?
I'm Craig Thorpe, but generally known as J. Craig Thorpe.
I live here in Bellevue, Washington.
I've been here since 1987.
I was an only kid.
And the art world became a place of welcome refuge for me.
I could create and enjoy that in my own little space, my own little world.
The railroading became a major focus for me.
That railroad influence was moved along when my family started getting calendars, little desktop calendars this big from a friend who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
All of those calendars featured the art of Grif Teller.
And I was thrilled by that.
And so Grif's work became an inspiration for me.
I went to Carnegie Mellon University.
The educational philosophy really taught me to think as an artist.
It wasn't so much focused on technique, as it was on thinking.
And I believe that that provided a strong foundation for what I've been doing for decades since.
I got a job working with Transportation Research Institute.
This was a HUD-funded organization, a think tank, if you will, with a transit focus.
They hired me to do -- well, I was the Gopher, but I also did charts and graphs and some renderings.
And that gave me the first chance to use -- to develop an architectural rendering style that had a railway or transit focus.
For the next few years, I did the architectural work.
And then an amazing opportunity opened in front of me.
I had been asked in the early '90s to do an illustration actually, an architectural illustration, for the as-then-unbuilt Olympia train station.
Well, Amtrak saw that and they wanted to know if they could pay me a use fee, and use that painting on their 1993 national calendar.
So that's what happened.
That's how the major shift from architecture to rail commenced.
Most of what I do, would really fall into two categories, ink and watercolor, and oils.
I'm mostly known for the oil paintings.
Both those realms and both sets of mediums I developed over the years, but it's the oils that I am most noted for.
Painting the past, I paint what we had as a nation for our rail infrastructure.
I paint what we had, and then we let it go.
We abandoned it.
We walked away from it.
So those paintings offer the viewer a window on what was.
The second realm, painting the present, is it's painting what we have now for rail transportation, but often miss.
We sort of blow by it, and because of that, we sort of resigned railways to the peripheral.
They're not that important.
It's just an annoyance.
But far from it.
The third is painting the possible, painting what we could have, and yet sometimes we just avoid it.
We don't even want to go there.
But we can have it and that's where the -- this architectural rendering style that I have invites the viewer into the future.
So a past, present and possible, has become an easy way to describe this trinity of focus.
There's something that happens when an artist looks at a scene and that image goes through the eye, into the brain and is processed, and works through the heart and comes out through the hand.
Something about that process brings life and vitality.
People respond to these, even the quirks.
It's not perfect like a digital image might be in many cases.
And in that, is a wonderful paradox and a wonderful introduction.
We're not perfect.
The art doesn't have to be.
It doesn't really accomplish much if it is perfect, but you want to connect with it.
So there's something about this that that goes beyond the readiness and the expediencies.
>> Funding for this edition of KBTC profiles provided by the KBTC Association.
>> KBTC profiles are available at kbtc.org.
