After hours

I’ve been on the E. L. Moore journey for awhile – since last August actually. Well, I’ve had an interest in his work since I was a boy in the ‘70s, but I didn’t take a deep dive into it until rather recently. It’s turning out to be a little more than just a happy jaunt down memory lane and having a look at all the sights along the way. Some of it has challenged my notions of what I’m doing as a hobbyist. Although I’ve spent a lot of effort being –as a friend of mine put it – an “E. L. Moore completist” collecting and reading all the articles he wrote, the more I read, and study his photos, the more I’ve come to understand that wasn’t all there was to this. For one, I like making scale buildings, but looking at them, I realize they’re often merely shells. Mr. Moore understood what a building is: a place that people use, where things happen. Just about all his projects make that abundantly clear in the way people and things are used and positioned. Shells devoid of life are pretty rare in his world; pretty common in mine. I’ve been looking at a few of my layout’s building shells and thought I’d try and get the stories out of a few of them that I had imagined them telling but never did anything about. I figured I’d start with one of my favourites: I really like the corner window of the ‘building-in-a-bag’ so I began with it, adding ornaments and things over a period of several weeks when I had some time. Hopefully I can post some more pictures of it over the next few days, and get going on improving other buildings on my layout.