Crow Train

A line of crows straggles across the pale ground, thinning out as it goes, and at the end of the trail sits a small boxy shape with one glowing headlamp and a red taillight. That is the train of the title, though it looks more like a toy left out in an enormous field. The birds behind it read almost like carriages, or like passengers who missed their stop. Everything else in the picture is stillness: bare hills the colour of old cement, blocky concrete buildings scattered without any obvious road connecting them, and above it all a sky thick with stars painted in deep blue-black.

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist best known for his wordless picture books, among them The Arrival and The Lost Thing, the latter of which he turned into an animated short that won an Academy Award in 2011. Alongside the books he paints in oils, and these paintings often circle back to the same territory: the outer edges of Australian suburbs and industrial towns, the places where houses stop and something less explainable begins. He grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, and that experience of living at the boundary of a city, with empty land pressing in, runs through much of his work.

Crows turn up again and again in Tan's pictures, sometimes as watchers, sometimes as something closer to commuters. Whether this scene is a mining settlement, an abandoned town, or somewhere invented entirely is left open. The painting gives you the buildings, the birds, the stars and the single small light, and leaves you to work out what sort of place this is and what the crows are doing out so late.