Art Car Photos: 1984-1996
My First Art Car Sighting!
I was on vacation with my family in 1984 when I saw this truck in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was so excited! I had never seen anything like it before! The truck had plastic fruit, doll heads, light bulbs and a lot of other stuff on it. This was the beginning of what will surely be a lifelong fascination.
Jon's Car
When I was a student at St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley, I had a friend named Jon. In the fall of 1989, he told me of a plan. He was going to Arizona to visit his father and he wanted to paint his car for the trip. All his friends would be invited to a combination Bon Voyage/Car Painting Party. Well, he was so exited that he couldn't wait that long, so one day between classes he said "Let's go to the hardware store!" So we went and bought a grocery sized bag of spray paint in all different colors. We attacked his car with them right in the school parking lot! We didn't really have a coherent plan, we just started spraying whatever motifs we were into at the time. For me it was paramecium and spore shapes. (That hasn't changed has it.) Another student joined in and Clinton, a photography student, documented the activity with his camera. On passer by came over and said to us, "Man, you must hate the guy whose car that is!" We explained that the owner of the car approved wholeheartedly of our work! I was kind of surprised that the campus police didn't at least ask us what we were doing but they didn't even look at us.
Later on, Clinton turned the episode into a really cool photography project for his class. He put several shots of the event in a mat that was spray painted to resemble the paint job on the car. I still have a large print from that day that he gave me. The photos above were taken by me a few months later after Jon and I worked on the car another day at my house. We added some more painting, more details with a brush, and added some glued on ceramic tiles, old watches, coins and other junk. We also attacked some of the interior with lime green paint.
It was fun watching all my neighbors driving by staring while we worked. It must have been an unusual sight to say the least. We had paint cans and containers all over the yard, bags of ceramic tile taken from the shard pile at school (we had a wall where all the ceramics students broke their bad pots, called the "Wailing Wall"), caulk guns filled with Liquid Nails, and assorted junk. I wish I had a picture of myself standing on the hood painting a giant lime green skeleton on the roof. I wanted something cool up there for people in trucks and buses to see. The Liquid Nails held the junk on surprisingly well.
After that, the fun was in riding around in it, blasting Led Zeppelin or Public Enemy on the tape deck and watching people stare at us. We did not live in the kind of areas where you'd expect to see art cars. One day we were riding down highway 270 and our friend Jean, who had a job driving school buses, passed us. We waved at her and all her students stared at us. I wonder if she admitted that she knew us? Another time Jon told me that he was driving my friend June to a concert and someone approached them and offered to sell them opium. Jon was so straight he didn't even drink!
I heard later that Jon sold the car and the new owner stripped our handiwork and painted the car primer brown. Bummer! That must have been quite a job to get all that tile and Liquid Nails off. But I'll always have happy memories of Jon's car.
I spotted this car in 1994 in a small town near Vail, Colorado. You can see Sonic the Hedgehog, and on the other side was Ren and Stimpy. While I was working in an army surplus store in Colorado, a man drove up in a truck painted like a cow. I grabbed the store camera, went outside, and asked the man if I could take a picture. Instead of answering, he got back in his truck and drove away! That was weird!
I heard there would be art cars at the 1996 Mardi Gras parade in St. Louis, so I made sure to be there. I was not disappointed as you can see.
Last October I went to Arkansas with my friends Mark and Sean to do a craft fair. In Eureka Springs we saw this van in a McDonald's parking lot. Good thing I had my camera with me!
Well, I hope you enjoyed my art car pictures. My sincere thanks go to all car artists everywhere, for making the world a more fun and more interesting place!
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