Wistful World Art

End of the line

One carriage, one window, a hundred and eighty-five years.

No conductor, no schedule, no refunds, no record of when the Line left the station, and no explanation of where it is going. You board in the Steamfolk years, when there is woodsmoke in the air, the machinery can be understood, and a wrench fixes most things. Then the years begin to pass behind the glass. Nickeldusk arrives in chrome, neon, and jet noise, with each decade louder and more complicated than the last, while inside the carriage the brass grows dull and the old world slips further away. By Umberdawn, the sky has gone wrong, the cities have fallen, and the faces waiting at the platform are built rather than born. You arrive with soot on your collar and 185 years behind you. Refreshments were discontinued somewhere around the meteor storm.

The Engine

The three newest paintings, newest at the front. The most recent work off the easel, and where the line is heading.

Latest The Curator of Things That Wash Up Steamfolk · painted 2026 Ida Shepard Oldroyd came to Long Beach in 1888 with an unreasonable interest in things that wash up, and soon the fishermen were shaking out their nets in her direction, because the odd spiral tangled in the mesh was worth more to her than the fish was to anyone. She married Tom in 1895 for the obvious reason, since he had shells too, and together they filled a house until the house complained, at which point she sold the whole glittering hoard to Stanford for eight thousand dollars, payable in installments, and let the university hire her to look after it. She had talked a great institution into buying her hobby and then paying her to keep doing it, which she did for twenty-four years. She died in 1940, and somewhere in a Stanford drawer a small sea creature’s abandoned house still wears her handwriting, filed exactly where she said. Acrylic · 24x30 in · 2" Cradled board

Evermore Steamfolk · painted 2026 Read the story →

She Rode Where Sense Would Not Follow Steamfolk · painted 2025 Read the story →

The three stops

Three eras, three galleries. Every painting on the line belongs to one of them, and each stop opens the whole set.

Steamfolk The age of brass and steam. 1860 to 1910. It starts here. Everything that follows is something they made possible. 35 paintings → Nickeldusk The long afternoon of the machine age. 1920 to now. The steam has cooled. The dawn hasn’t broken yet. 8 paintings → Umberdawn First light of the next century. Tomorrow, and after. The long night is over. This is the light coming up. 18 paintings →

The last car

The one car carrying work that is for sale. Each painting goes straight to its own page, to see it properly and ask about it.

The Caboose The paintings cleared to leave the line See everything available →

Mira Del Fin No Contrapposto Better than candy DigiKit