1954
There's a slow-motion dread to Horse and Train. Like the nightmare that leaves you powerless, whether to wake up or to change its course, forcing you to sit through the entire bloody thing. Or like the exact moment you realize something has gone wrong, always far too late: a glass falling off a table, a turbine sputtering into silence. Or the accident you can't look away from, around which the rest of the world screams to a halt. Colville's style of painting, famously reminiscient of 3D animation twenty years before it entered the mainstream consciousness, gives this work a sense of immense weight and gravity. The same is true of the setting. The horse's presence upon the tracks suggests inescapability. Its course is just as set as the opposing train's, the consequences for veering just as dire, its gruesome end coldly accepted by both parties— for where else are they meant to go but forward? Horse and Train is an exercise in painting not just Fate but Doom manifest.