Thomas Hart Benton painted “West Side Express” with a palette knife. In this work it was useful to contrast something powerful with something delicate. Benton’s train is colossal and powerful. Add the little girl to the piece and the dark machinery of the locomotive is positively menacing. To paint this girl, this delicate feature, with the awkwardness of a palette knife is a breathtaking example of an artist mastering a tool as surely as Michelangelo tenderly addressed marble with a chisel.

While beautiful sculpture possesses movement as it is viewed from various angles, there is a preponderance of dramatic movement within “West Side Express.” The stage is set. There is tension in the painterly industrial buildings that are reminiscent of precisionist work. They are almost pleading to be expressionist, but they must obey the necessity for scenery where the drama can take place. So it is also with the pedestrian overpass. Walk there at your own risk. As the storm whirls about chaotically you may start to feel a sense of unease and disorientation.

Balance can be tested in a work of art by removing any element. If that element is essential for the composition or structure of the painting, then the picture is a lively or lovely melody that is diminished by the loss of a single note. Analyzing the arts is useful intellectually, but in the case of “West Side Express” it is like eating a meal without tasting it. Why? Because the painting’s full impact is immediate, replete with a range of tones resounding at once.

There is a curling mass of bright smoke that rises tumultuously from a train that is a tensely compressed poem of dark within darkness. Be prepared for action painting at its essential best. We are moved and bounced about physically and emotionally from light to darkness, darkness to light, back and forth with impressions of thrilling nuances.

Where is the focus of attention? Is it the train? Could it be the little girl? The buildings with their gently brushed make-believe windows? Benton draws us into this masterwork. It is action painting. We participants are the focus. We are where the action is. In a spellbinding pace we may choose to rest on one of countless sensual nuances. For instance, the bright cloud of smoke is supported by soft gray-greens, electric blues, burnt violets, and earth tones of mystifying origin, all seasoned with a couple of dashes of bright red!

In relentlessness, light is bent to advance the darkness, not illuminate it. Benton’s wobbly geometry, a novel approach to cubism, is offset by curvilinear touches from the breasts atop the speeding locomotive. Massive shapes of textured color create a frail young girl. Is she really frail? No! She has the presence and strength necessary to stop a train hell bent for glory.

Paint is used to transform shapes, line, and color into works that evoke aspects of music such as harmony, dissonance, tension, crescendos, diminuendos, rhythms, etc. In “West Side Express,” there are portions of the work that can be understood from a musical perspective. The motion of the train depicts a glissando where a pianist forcefully and rapidly charges into the keyboard with grace, beauty and style. The quick little windows are like dance steps to a familiar beat. The element of surprise is prevalent in all kinds of music. By 1920, Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” was a famed piano piece celebrating the unexpected. Inserted in an even ragtime tempo, Berlin’s composition calls for a piano bugle call and a sweet rendition of  “Suwannee River.”

Much like classical music, the jazz movement has always endeavored to bring something new and unprecedented to the most cultivated ear. “West Side Express” is jazz. The sky widely ranges in color. There are touches of heavy turquoise, icy blues and a blunt green that support daggers of an alchemist’s rendition of burnt sienna. Exhausted by this display of virtuosity, the eye is invited to rest in comforting patches of gray.

Every shape, color, line, allusion and illusion has purpose. “West Side Express” works tirelessly to engage us in new avenues of beauty and is a window into the future of artworks yet to come.                                                                                                                             ________Don Beaulieu

From the Archives of AskArt.com

Donald Martin Beaulieu was born May 12, 1950 in Detroit, Michigan. He holds a BA in Philosophy and English, and a B.S. in Education. After a leg injury, he returned to his University and one other for five more years to study painting, ceramics, earthenware and other art forms.

Donald Hoffman, long-time art critic for the Kansas City Star, wrote in 1986, “Donald Beaulieu’s one-man show at the Art Effects Gallery …romps through such diverse mediums as oils, watercolors, pastels, ink line drawings, wash drawings, ceramic tiles and pottery. In this display of energy and virtuosity, Mr Beaulieu …reveals an eclectic modernism, more or less abstract and often animated by fantasy and the surreal.”

That in his art has continued apace. His work has won many museum prizes and purchase awards around the country. In 2014 his art was featured in New Letters magazine. It is in museum and private collections from Florida to Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest, as well as in each state from Nebraska to the Rio Grande and as far west as Nevada and Hawaii. His home, near Kansas City, is in St. Joseph, Missouri (where he grew up and has lived for many years).