Longtime art instructor Jim Bray is retiring with style.

The current exhibit in the Spiva Art Gallery is a mix of 38 of Bray’s favorite works of art celebrating his long career as an artist and instructor. After a 12-year teaching stint at Missouri Southern, Bray, professor of art, will retire in June.

The exhibit shows a variety of techniques, ideas and skills, from complex contemporary pieces to simple still lifes. A major theme running through the exhibit is mechanical devices, in particularly trains.

“Flying machines, trains, trucks and motorcycles, anything like that is fascinating to me,” Bray said.

Bray thinks some of his attachment to the locomotive come from the fact his father was a hobo who taught him to jump the trains.

“It’s a nostalgic thing, part of my past,” he said. “They’re memories of past experiences that had an impact on me.”

His love for the locomotive stretches past his art and bleeds into his everyday life.

“I expect I’m one of the few people who will sit and watch a train and not get impatient,” he said.

Various train subjects dominate the exhibit because Bray finds the intricate mechanisms challenging to draw. Unlike some other still lifes, Bray said students could spend up to 40 or 50 hours on one train painting.

“They’re big and intimidating, but fascinating with colors, detail and shadows,” Bray said. “It’s a complex drawing problem, like a chess game. It’s challenging and kind of an adventure to see if you can get all this stuff down on paper and then translate it to a painting.”

Bray teaches life and figure drawing, acrylic and watercolor painting and typographical design. He regularly takes his students on outdoor excursions to paint old versions of previously glorious trains and trucks.

“I used to take my class to the Santa Fe rail yards,” he said. “It was exciting, being there right in the middle of everything. They took us for a ride once.”

Some of the other paintings in the exhibit concern World War II aircraft and old farmhouses while others are modern in nature and seem indecipherable at first glance. Regardless of the style, every work has its own story. As a collection the exhibit is deeply personal to Bray. He painted one of the exhibited works years ago for a friend who flew the warplane out of Germany. In the painting the plane’s landing gear is down and the propeller is stopped because the plane ran out of gas and crashed.

Some of the contemporary pieces are Bray’s favorites and particularly important to him.

“There’s stories in all of them,” Bray said. “There’s stuff here that tells something about me because mixed in here is experimental stuff that contains more subjective matter. It’s not just what I see, but a little of what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling.”

Bray’s experience includes illustrating and designing Hallmark cards and 28 years of teaching and administration at Phillips University in Oklahoma. Bray is a favorite among his students and his unique experiences and teaching style will be missed.

“We are so lucky to have him,” said Genii Kress, senior studio art major. “He makes us look at stuff differently. I’ll never look at a sky again without seeing it in watercolor.”

The exhibit ends Feb. 27 with a reception from 4:30-7 p.m. in Bray’s honor.

Bray intends to continue painting after his retirement.

“There’s still a little bit of painter left in me,” he said. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”