Coreen Mary Spellman was a fine-art teacher as well as a painter, designer, illustrator, lithographer and muralist. Many of her paintings depicted human-made structures and industrial landscapes in a style combining realism, precisionism, and abstraction. Often the central subject such as in "Railroad Signal" was the only suggestion of humanity against a backdrop of stark Texas landscape.

Of her painting these isolated subjects she said: "I enjoy taking some rather obscure or unimportant subject or theme and making something fine and important out of it . . . It always gives me great pleasure to discover something which has been passed over as being inadequate material". (Trenton 199)

Spellman was born in Forney, Texas in 190...