Nostalgia and a lack of clutter…

Nostalgia, an innocent fuel for the soul, melancholic and rearward looking, hankering after a simpler time, perhaps from childhood. Nostalgia, perhaps a key ingredient in an artful approach to model railways…

08761, a gently weathered Farish 08, silent on Paxton Road. This transports me not just to Chester station watching similar liveried Sprinters, but to the library on a Saturday morning, in the basement level, sat on the big box steps at the back with a book from the ‘Transport’ section pouring over all the new sector liveries. 

For if we wish to tell a story, to imbue the finished piece with a tangible atmosphere so clear you can almost taste it what better place to start? Not that the work need be of a nostalgic subject, just that we as artists recognise and channel those feelings in the process of creating, the ‘work’ of art. 

People often comment that my layouts remind them of place X or Y, when to me they are Z.

That magic ingredient that makes this possible is our imagination. When a modeller adds clutter and cameos to a scene, rather than add, in my opinion they subtract. The finished piece becomes less than the sum of its parts. Give the imagination space to roam, a few ‘key’ elements imagined with this in mind enough to signpost an era or location, the rest up to us and the viewer.

So nostalgia and imagination become fairly comfortable bed fellows and our work becomes art. 

Enjoy your weekend. Until next time, more soon…

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