BIG STONE GAP, Va. – A three-week exhibition of railroad watercolors and photographs by author and Trains contributor Ron Flanary is scheduled to begin Jan. 17 on the campus of Mountain Empire Community College.
Titled “The Tracks of my Years,” the display of 30 pieces consists of about two-thirds photos and one-third paintings, all made over a period of more than 60 years. Flanary will open the exhibition with remarks at a reception to be held on Jan. 17 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in Wampler Library, located in Robb Hall.
The photos and paintings will be displayed in the library’s Slemp Gallery. A concurrent exhibit of railroad memorabilia will be displayed by the Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park.
Flanary, 76, began sketching trains at age 3 and, aside from one art lesson at about age 8 or 9, is self-taught. His work has been featured in Trains magazine, on book jackets, and in private collections. He has authored or co-authored 10 books and more than 300 magazine articles.
He has served as president of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad Historical Society and currently edits its quarterly magazine. He is a co-author, with Charles B. Castner and Charles Buccola, of the society’s book L&N Big Emma – The Story of the Louisville & Nashville’s M-1 2-8-4s., released last year by Garbely Publishing Co. He is also winner of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society’s 2021 Fred A. and Jane R. Stindt photography award.
The paintings and photos in the exhibition, Flanary said, represent “a mix of regional [subjects], central Appalachia, out West, the Midwest, and the South.” Besides private individuals, clients for his commissioned paintings include the former L&N, CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern.
Born in 1948, he remembers the last years of L&N steam locomotives in Virginia, particularly 2-8-2 Mikados and 2-8-4 Berkshires. Long before he owned a camera, he was sketching them from trackside. He took his first railroad photo in 1955 when his grandfather, wary of stooping to climb through a fence to get a shot of an L&N derailment, put a camera in his hands, told him what to do, and sent him through the fence to the wreck scene.
After graduating from Clinch Valley College, part of the University of Virginia, Flanary entered an engineering department management trainee program with Southern Railway. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1970, he later returned to civilian life and chose to enter public service, eventually becoming executive director of a large regional planning commission in Duffield, Va.
An early start
“I started sketching steam locomotives at a very early age,” he told News Wire. “Somewhere in my head I saw something I enjoyed and the creation of art.” He later found that many of the same principles applied in photography “[I wasn’t] thinking about leading lines, light, rule of thirds, but as time went on I realized that every time you pressed the shutter, you were an artist with the potential to be interesting, creating something, being inspiring.”
Among railroad artists, he said, “One of my heroes was Howard Fogg, who did both watercolors, and oil. We used to correspond by [mailed] cassette tape, 40 minutes at a time. I visited him in Boulder [Colo.] a couple of times, and stayed in touch up until his death.”
Flanary also copied another railroad artist’s work, after admiring the 1935 Pennsylvania Railroad calendar painting, Grif Teller’s The World’s Greatest Highway – Horseshoe Curve. “From a compositional standpoint, it looked pretty good,” he said, “perspective, lighting, shading.” He liked it so much that he painted a similar scene but inserted an L&N U.S. Railroad Administration light 4-8-2 Mountain-type engine, No. 421.
Although he’s worked in various media – pen and ink, pastels, acrylics, charcoal, and oil-on-canvas, he settled on watercolors fairly early. “I never could get the knack of painting effectively with oil,” he said. “I got comfortable with watercolor” despite the drawback that “you can’t make a mistake – it’s hard to correct.”
He did vary the approach recently, using mixed media – watercolor and colored pencils – to create a painting for the jacket of Fred Frailey’s railroad novel Wacky Dust: What Happens on a Train, which centers on movie starlet Liz Taylor and other colorful characters riding Santa Fe’s famed Super Chief passenger train in 1946. He portrayed the actress walking beside a red-and-silver Warbonnet Electro-Motive E3 diesel unit, with a gaggle of paparazzi.
Flanary and his wife Wilma live in Big Stone Gap and besides writing, editing, painting, and photography, he is an accomplished jazz trumpeter.
