The Empire Builder Picked My Next Ten Artworks and Honestly It Did a Better Job Than I Ever Have

There's a moment in every creative person's life when they realize that waiting for inspiration is basically waiting for a bus that stopped running in 2019. You stand there. You check the time. Nothing comes.

So instead of waiting, I did what I do: I outsourced the decision to something with absolutely no opinion about art. This time, it was a printed Amtrak timetable for the Empire Builder — the legendary 2,200-mile route that runs from Chicago to Seattle/Portland via places like Minot, North Dakota, and Wolf Point, Montana. I pinned it above my desk and made a rule: every artwork I made for the next month had to be 'about' the next stop on the line, in order, no skipping, no do-overs.

The train picked. I just painted.

The Rules of the Route

Here's how it worked. The Empire Builder stops at roughly forty stations between Chicago and the Pacific coast. I started at the beginning — Chicago Union Station — and worked my way west. Each piece got the name of the stop, the scheduled arrival time, and the layover duration as its raw material.

That meant the piece for Winona Junction had to somehow contend with the fact that the train arrives there at 10:47 PM. The piece for Glacier Park had to live inside a five-minute stop at the base of a national park. Some stops gave me a city with a hundred years of history. Some gave me a platform and a water tower.

The constraint was the whole point. I wasn't allowed to ask myself "what do I feel like making today?" — a question that has ruined more mornings than I can count. The train had already answered. It was my turn to catch up.

Why a Timetable Beats a Mood Board

There's something quietly profound about a train schedule. It's a document of pure intention — this machine will be here at this time, whether you're ready or not. It doesn't care about your creative block. The Empire Builder rolls through Cut Bank, Montana at 9:12 PM regardless of whether I've figured out what color that piece should be.

That indifference is freeing. When the structure comes from outside yourself, you stop negotiating with your own taste. I've written before about letting dice, strangers, and junk folders run the studio, and the pattern keeps repeating: the more arbitrary the constraint, the faster the work shows up.

Highlights From the Line

A few pieces from the month, for the record:

• Chicago Union Station (9:15 AM): A chaotic collage of departure boards, old Pullman ads, and half a map of the Loop. Everything about it felt like a beginning, because it was one.

• Minot, North Dakota (8:02 AM): The famous "Magic City" — named for how fast it seemed to appear during a railroad construction boom in 1886. I made a piece about a city that materializes overnight, all scaffolding and optimism. It's the most hopeful thing I've ever painted, which is deeply suspicious.

• Wolf Point, Montana (9:40 AM): A ten-minute stop in a town of under 3,000 people. I made the smallest piece of the month — a painting the size of a postcard — because that's what ten minutes buys you.

• Spokane, Washington (1:53 AM): A middle-of-the-night arrival in a city most riders sleep through. I made something you're only supposed to look at in the dark.

• Portland or Seattle? (The split): The Empire Builder literally forks in two at Spokane. My final piece was two paintings that could only be shown together, one headed for each end of the line.

What the Railroad Already Knew

Here's the weird history part: the original transcontinental routes weren't chosen by dreamers. They were chosen by surveyors, land grants, water access, and politics. The poetry of the American West was built on top of deeply unpoetic logistics. And yet somehow the result — a line drawn across a continent, with names stapled to it every few hundred miles — became one of the most romantic objects in American culture.

The lesson for the studio is the same. You don't need a perfect reason to start. You need a line, a schedule, and the willingness to show up at the station whether or not you feel inspired. The train was never waiting on me. That's exactly why it worked.

I finished all ten pieces in thirty-one days. That's more finished work than I produced in the previous six months combined. The timetable is still pinned above my desk. I've started eyeing the Crescent — New Orleans to New York — and wondering what a piece about Tuscaloosa at 8:43 PM would look like.

The train knows. It always does.