Loewy II

Frank Haase
Loewy II
Shadow painting: Transfer film on glass, acrylic on canvas 2008
30 x 80 cm
– sold –

Sometimes the disciplines meet and form intersections: design meets engineering, form meets function, practicality is combined with elegance. Then distinctive locomotives, cars, ships or machines are created. They provide the templates for the motifs in my shadow painting series “Technology & Design”.

An example of this is the shadow painting “Loewy II” (Fig.), named after the French-American designer Raymond Loewy. This piece of art shows the GG1 class locomotive designed by Loewy and put into service on the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1935. Connoisseurs of railway history still consider this locomotive to be one of the most beautiful electric locomotives in the world and for 50 years it formed the backbone of high-speed passenger traffic in the northeastern United States. At 24.2 meters in length, the GG1 weighed 216 tons and reached a top speed of 161 km/h.

On the shadow painting you can see the GG1 in the typical paintwork of the PRR with five horizontal stripes. The broken black surface with its irregular openings and the blurred background give “Loewy II” a noticeable dynamic. The arrangement of the motif, which rises slightly to the right, reinforces this impression.