Small Town NY by Edmund Yaghijan

Although a train platform in the foreground bears the name “Small Town,” the frame of Yaghjian’s painting had referenced Beacon, NY before getting crossed out in favor of this more universal theme. We are invited to ascend a wooden stairway into a quaint town whose buildings are arrayed upon its hillside: a brick commercial building near the tracks, a church and more ornate homes higher up. Warm earthtones and green foliage predominate. Small traces of the forces that would transform such towns lurk at the corners of the painting, like telephone wires or an automobile at lower right.