If you are intrigued by David Cobb's art and reflections on rail, industry, and culture, check out the Cite Infrastructure Issue.
I began painting the railcars or "rolling stock" back in my college years at the University of Houston as a project for my undergraduate studies. I was helping my father, Tom Cobb, digitize his extensive collection of slides he'd taken of the Southern Pacific railroad, mainly from the 1970's and 80's. As we scanned and doctored images I became enthralled with the photos of boxcars. Simple, utilitarian, industrial, vital, yet so commonplace they seem to go unnoticed. I was hooked. It was time to honor the boxcar. The idea of using the rolling stock as my reference for the modern day railway instead of the typical grandiose depiction of a steam engine or diesel locomotive muscling its way through an open landscape seemed to been more honest.
So from there I began shooting my own photos of railcars not knowing exactly where I was headed with it. I began photographing in local railyards and down around the petro chemical areas on the port and Pasadena refineries, eventually making my way to Galveston where I discovered a little railyard free of hassle. As I looked at the images it was the layering of graffiti over the structural elements of the boxcars that really stood out. So I began cropping the photos to include the details around the door areas where the combination of structural and mechanical elements painted over with graffiti was the most complex. It is from these images that I create my paintings.
One of the interesting things I've discovered was found looking into the history of railcar graffiti. Their are some very well known monikers (usually simple images drawn with a white paint stick) including Bozo Texino, Herby, and The Colossus of Roads that still exist on cars today and are being preserved by a small following. They call themselves rebuilders due to their practice of tracing over the old drawings to keep them alive. I wonder how many of today's graffiti artists will be given the same respect.
The hardest part of my paintings was recreating the organic nature and vibrant color of the modern graffiti artist. The folklore that I have unravelled has actually, in a way, uncovered one of my significant relationships to the images. The monikers or chalk drawings were thought to be used by the hobo community to communicate location and travels on the rail when in actuality most of them drew, and drew religiously, to be recognized and remembered. The same is true of the artists that cover the cars today. And so it seems I too am using the railway format to create my own legacy.
