Kids

Oil on canvas, 24" x24"

Albert's Angle

Oil on canvas, 18" x 24"

JOE DE MERS' TONSORIAL PARLOR AND ABSTRACT ART GALLERY

Joe De Mers (1910-1984) illustrated women's magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, a market characterized by simplified pictures of pretty girls against plain backgrounds.





Later generations would look down on what Robert Weaver ridiculed as "candy box" illustration. Jim Silke accurately noted, "that style was derisively called the 'big head school of illustration,' a name derived from the fact that every picture was dominated by a huge close up of a beautiful woman...." Illustrator Al Parker explained the popularity of such illustrations with tasteless audiences:

Readers demand pretty people in pretty settings forming a pretty picture. The larger your audience, the more limited its taste. It prefers subject matter to design and girls to men. It wants no message other than girls are cute and men like cute girls.

At the same time De Mers was catering to popular taste, genius artists such as De Kooning, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell and Diebenkorn were boldly experimenting with abstract paintings. Compare the freedom, vigor and originality of De Kooning's brilliant masterpiece:



...with these details from the bourgeois pablum being served up by De Mers:



Errrr.....







Umm....

See the difference?

Lightning McQueen Volvo Rally Art Car

If you were 3 years old, what car do you want your parents to own? It's not an easy question to ask a 3 year old as there answers are limited. However, Lightning McQueen surely has to be one of the top. And, if you need a sporty looking vehicle to base your Lightning McQueen on - what would you choose? A Volvo 740 of course.

In this case, three grown adults made the car of their dreams, apparently. A Volvo 740 plucked from obscurity that had spent its life driving round the UK's home counties, was now made into an art car. And driven across Europe repeatedly on our events.

I've never actually worked out what the motivation to make this car was, apart from further capitalising on a Cars dvd they had obviously bought.

You may be wondering whether there are any similarities between this car and a real sports car. There aren't.

However, the side effect of being the proud owner of Lightning McQueen meant that the owner was constantly bugged by their kids to take them to school in Lightning, which included half the kids from the neighbourhood. As the owner lamented one day, we can do the school run in a brand new Mercedes, or Lightning. Lightning won every time.

So there we have it. How to impress your children. Make Lightning McQueen.

By Justin Clements Street Safari

Speed doesn't kill people, cars hanging from trees in Australia telling people that "speed kills", kills people

Again with the hanging car, but this time its a warning to other drivers in West Australia that "Speed Kills". But did did it ever occur to the marketing genius that distraction also kills. What is the point of slowing down only to run into another tree while trying to read the sign. Two weeks later your car is up on a tree down the street saying "Billboards Kill". Speed doesn't kill people, cars hanging from trees in Australia telling people that "speed kills", kills people. Photo by Owen

Art Cars Hanging Out To Dry in Chile

Art Cars Hanging Out To Dry in Chile - Photo by Eliseo Fernandez / Reuters

Just got a tip from Kelly Lyles owner of Excessories Odd-Yssey about some pretty art cars hanging out to dry in Valparaiso, Chile during the National Festival Of Arts. Shown here with Generik Vapeur playing his bagpipe which I guess helps paint dry faster???

THE BEGGARSTAFF BROTHERS

In 1894, Scottish artist James Pryde teamed with English artist William Nicholson to create posters under the pseudonym "the Beggarstaff Brothers" (a name they found on a torn sack of grain in an old stable yard).



Pryde and Nicholson brought very different perspectives to their partnership. Pryde was tall and heavy, while Nicholson was short and thin. Pryde grew up in a noisy, eccentric household of "violent views" while Nicholson was raised in a "gentle, well-bred, well-mannered atmosphere." Pryde was outspoken and gregarious, while Nicholson was quiet and detached. Pryde worked very casually while Nicholson was serious and driven. Recalled Pryde, "our opinions on artistic matters differed widely."

If those weren't enough causes for friction, Nicholson fell in love with Pryde's younger sister against her mother's wishes. Colin Campbell's excellent book on the Beggarstaffs reports that "after a courtship conducted largely, it seems, among the coalsacks in the cellar of the Pryde's Bloomsbury home, the couple married in secret at Ruslip on 25 April 1893."

Who could ask for a better foundation for an artistic partnership?

Yet, their clashing perspectives seem to have stimulated them to abandon the dominant styles of their day in favor of a radical new approach. The Beggarstaffs transformed the history of poster art with a series of bold, simple designs using flat images and silhouettes.





In 1896, an arts magazine interviewed the Brothers on their technique:

One of us gets an idea, said Pryde. We talk it over, the other suggests an addition, the matter is reconsidered, perhaps shelved away for months. Finally we draw the design very roughly with charcoal on big sheets of paper, and then place the lines and masses in their places on the groundwork, which is generally of ordinary brown paper.

Like Matisse after them, the Biggerstaffs found that it helped simplify their designs if they worked with shapes cut out of colored paper.



Not surprisingly, Pryde maintained that a pen knife was best for this purpose while Nicholson favored scissors.

The Beggarstaff team only stayed together for three short years. They were a commercial failure, as clients were not sure what to make of these bold new images. But their designs became hugely influential with artists in Europe and America, and helped usher in the Early Modern era which replaced the highly ornate art nouveau and arts and crafts movements.

Pryde and Nicholson separated, turning to painting and other artistic pursuits to earn a living. They never again succeeded in achieving the quality they found during their brief but remarkable collaboration.

Bellevue NE 4th St

Oil on canvas,
24" x 30"

The Road Car

In this case the car IS the road and called the "road car" brought to you by Brian in Michigan. The paint is that spray stone texture with some added black splatters. The double yellow lines are custom mixed house paint so that it peels and flakes with age JUST LIKE REAL ROAD LINES. By the way it shoots blood from the windshield wiper sprayers.

Close up of the "road car" texture. This is after a test spraying from the windshield wiper "blood" while going 60mph. The rain helped it flow better and wash off easily.

Spaced out Moonraker Volvo Rally Art Car

From the deranged minds that brought you the Tank Volvo and Helicopter, we have a space shuttle theme.

Not sure what the background to the idea from these particular overachievers is, maybe Moonraker, but they decided to do a space shuttle theme, with a trailer tent (its like a tent, but on a trailer) with a world on it.

Obviously, making a space shuttle out of a Volvo just doesn't work (you need a BMW 1600 for that, which we shall show you in future weeks), so they made their own space shuttle, mounted two side boosters (SRBs) to the Volvo, and effectively made the Volvo into the external fuel tank.

Then, bolt a great big round piece of metal onto the trailer, paint the Earth on it, and hey presto, you have your very own horizontal Space Shuttle Program, with a diagram of the Earth on the trailer behind incase you forget what your home planet looks like.

The team (the overachievers) even put in some pyrotechnics so that the shuttle actually looks like it has an exhaust trail! We like. Partly because it's always fun to see a bit of thought behind these things, and partly because the chance of the whole thing catching fire is greatly increased.

The trailer tent deserves it's own 15 seconds of fame. It was possibly the mankiest tent you have ever seen in your life. They think the previous owners bought all the camping gear, went camping once, didn't like it, packed the tent wet (remember it's canvas), and let the whole thing fester and rot for several years.

When the team opened the tent for the first time in many years, there were literally bits missing from the canvas, large sections in fact.

But quick to their aid came some drinking aids. They installed a set of optics in the trailer for each evening, and as long as you got far too drunk, you didn't notice the howling gail in the car each night. Or at least, I think that's how that was meant to work.

By Justin Clements Street Safari

Call of the Syren - Goth 72 Cadilac by Christa Ansbergs

Syren Art Car at Art Car Fest - Photo by Bagel

Christa Ansbergs is the creator of a 72 Cadillac called Syren and is a regular participant at Art Car Fest where I met her. She loves the "goth" look and the darker side of life so she drives an art car to match.

When she went looking for the right car she considered buying a used hearse, but found that they were to expensive and a pain to maintain because parts were harder to come by. So she settled for a 1972 Cadillac DeVille and got going with her art car creation. She has painted flowers on the side, appropriate goth bumper stickers all over the trunk, rope arrangement across the hood, and spray painted lace pattern the roof with a chain fence. If you look closely syren has fangs in her grill, so  make sure not stand to close.

I also found a great picture of her at Maker Faire a few years back wearing a skirt she made from bike inner tubes, rolled up in the shape of a skirt and sown together to complete her goth outfit:) Sorry it took so long to put you up on ACC, but here you are, finally:) 

Syren Art Car at Art Car Fest - Photo by Bagel

Christa Ansbergs at Maker Faire

The New Face of Corvette - Oprah Art Car and more

Photo By karrelbuck
The Oprah Corvette Art Car could very well be one of the most amazing finds of my blogging career. I am not sure who would do that to Oprah or who would do that to a Corvette, but I have a sinking suspicion. I think its the same person who made the Oprah Cake to celebrate their new Oprah tattoo.

Scott Road and 92 Ave Surrey BC

Oil on canvas,
24" x 36"

The Fantastic Life of Mercedes Art Cars

As the title sponsor of Berlin’s Fashion Week, Mercedes-Benz placed some of its own designs into striking art installations meant to represent the eras in which the cars were built.
As part of the “Recollection Quartett,” staged by Mercedes-Benz and MoMu Fashion Museum, Antwerp, Belgian artist and photographer Frederik Heyman placed four cars amidst updated stereotypes of the years between 1967 and 1991.
For instance, though the SL roadster shown above was built in Germany, the artist said it came into its own on Sunset Boulevard during the freewheeling 1970s. Though we seem to recall gas lines, Watergate and skyrocketing interest rates, Heyman and fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm pay tribute to those who spent the entire Carter administration on a mattress at Plato’s Retreat.
Interestingly, the 1980s-era W123 wagon best known in the United States for shuttling wealthy suburbanites between tennis lessons and the pool at the club was popular among West German lumberjacks, tradesmen and outdoors enthusiasts. Mannequins in shoulder pads surrounding an S-Class coupe underneath fragments of a globe made from a chess board represent wealth and power in the late ’80s, while the models’ long shadows show they’re also pawns in that game.
About the only installation we can instantly relate to is the one surrounding the rock-solid W115. Faceless businesspeople in gray flannel suits look like they’ve stepped straight out of a Magritte painting, while a secretary in the front seat types out an advertisement in Arabic that reads “Taxi for sale,” a nod to the livery service the venerable “Stroke 8″ models have offered around the world.
While the settings are certainly high-concept, they’re also proof that cars are as much a product of their respective eras as they are representative of those times.
Photos: Mercedes-Benz

The W115 was popular among business types and cab drivers in far-flung locales

Bobby Brown drove a 560 SEC, and so did world power players in the late '80s.

By Keith Barry January 21, 2011

Crazy Corvette Batmobile Mod

This crazy Corvette Batmobile mod was sent in by Sonny Fenwick creator of The Bubble Truck . We don't know who, what why when, but we do know that it might be located somewhere in Panama City, Florida off high way 98. Will the owner of this Batmobile mod step forward and tell us more about it and where to get one.