"Here in My Car..."

Let it never be said that I was much of a car guy.  I'm not that dude that would spend his weekends lying in the driveway working on my car's undercarriage or lovingly buffing Turtle Wax into the hood.  I know how to check the oil, replace wiper blades, and change a tire.  That is the pathetic extent of my knowledge of the functional parts of an automobile.  Cars simply haven't caught my attention beyond their basic ability to provide transport from A to B.
And yet...the more I paint them...the more and more I'm struck by their ample aesthetic appeal.

If you are a lover of history, and want to paint historical paintings, you end up depicting things that you would never bother painting in a million years on their own.  Telegraph wires.  Ads on buildings.  Streetcar lines.  Spokes on wheels.  Horses.  And of course, cars.
Far from being a burdensome task, rendering cars has become one of my more pleasurable ones.  I love the smooth metallic lines, especially on 1940's era vehicles.  Whitewall tires on a car add a lovely retro touch to a painting.  And the chrome bumpers and hubcaps deliver all sorts of opportunities for little highlights, glints and reflections.
Oh, and there's the colours: the blacks and darker colours that dominated the Model T era to the beautiful blues and sea-foam greens of the 1950s.  Cars can also provide a complimentary counterpoint to the other elements in a painting.  Often I'll include a navy blue car in a scene that is dominated by warm hues simply to 'expand the palette', so that the final piece has a full range of colour and doesn't appear sepia-tinted.

But beyond the flowing lines and cool colours, cars provide one more critical function in a painting.  They date the piece.  There are several markers for determining the age of a picture, such as clothing styles.  But few have the decade-specific accuracy of the automobile.  I know this because I research archival images constantly, and more often or not it's the cars in the scene that provide the key dating for a pic. People from the past often posed beside their vehicle, probably because it was one of their greatest sources of consumer pride.  What a wonderful favour they ended up doing for future generations.

Cars are an indelible part of our culture.  For that reason, I try hard to get the details right in my paintings, but my patience for minutiae is finite, so I focus more on their essence than their accuracy, which occasionally results in some sort of reprimand by old timers at my booth.  "That's a '58 Olds but you've got the wrong kind of tail light".

Yeah? Well I'll tell you what Mack...if you buy the painting I'll change the taillights for ya.  That's a bit of auto body work I definitely CAN do!