9.15.20

Mom’s Car paintings

I’ve painted handles before - mug handles. Now I try again, for a similar reason: I want to work with the larger subject (in this case: cars, and before: mugs), but including its entire shape yields an icon. So I settle on a rich component: the interface between the object and the user: the handle.

Cars: despite their ubiquity, and generally practical appearance, they have always had a touch of the exotic (speed, instrumentation, surround sound of radio, scent of owner, crumbs of owner). Recently, more: they seem larger, more expensive, more dangerous, more air-conditioned, more wired, more in need of precious fuel. They still promise freedom - delicious after many months of restricted movement. So close, so far, so good, so bad.

Growing up I felt strongly about my family’s cars, just as much as about the clothes I wore and the lunchbox I carried. But when they started to become larger, more rounded, almost bloated, in the late 90s, they lost their visual appeal for me. Maybe it was the physical ideal for rail-thin, curve-less bodies I had internalized. Maybe it was a preference for unadorned, functional design, and the assumption that that meant straight lines and right angles. Maybe the two biases were related. Almost universally, contemporary vehicles still feature rounded, bloated designs. Their handles are not exempt, and despite my aversion, I can paint them with ease.

I mix a few tones, pull them thin across the canvas, lay in some dark edges, and a handle appears full-fledged. Very quickly, the big-ticket item is present larger-than-life on a 11x14” surface, and with it attraction to the symbol, repulsion to the actual design, and a host of unanticipated referents that vacillate between allusions to speed or aerodynamics and the friendliness of a toddler’s toy: rockets, animal heads (turtles? geese? fish?), swollen valves or veins, something emerging, or surfacing. Each variation is plausible, a common hybrid of mechanical and organic form found in other common objects - shampoo bottles, soap dispensers, bike helmets, performance sneakers, desk chairs, ...

I dirty some edges, add flowers (ostensibly reflected in the metallic surface), and title the paintings ‘Mom’s Car’, in order to include the crumbs: to ground the conjured in the specific, to create a kind of domestic portrait, to revel in the mutant look of freedom persisting in the detail, in the driveway, and then put it on my apartment wall.