Railway trestle bridge near Yarra Glen

The story behind Railway trestle bridge near Yarra Glen

Coming into Yarra Glen from Lilydale, these old timber trestle bridges are among the first things you see — remnants of the Healesville railway line, still standing in the paddocks. For anyone who drove that road regularly, they are as familiar as the hills behind them.

This is one of a series of small Yarra Glen paintings from 2009, and like the others it is painted from a postcard rather than an original photograph. Postcard printing compresses the color gamut considerably — what the camera captured, and what the human eye would have seen, is not what ends up on the card. The painter’s job is to read through that compression and reconstruct something closer to the original perception. It is a different discipline to working from a high-resolution source, and in its own way a useful one.

The format is panoramic, wider than it is tall, which suits the subject exactly — the bridge spanning the frame, the Yarra Valley rolling out behind it, hay bales scattered through the paddock.

Source image of realism painting Railway trestle bridge near Yarra Glen