Reveries, revelations…

Although I knew, when I started this blog, that I wanted to talk about what it was in our backgrounds–mine and my brother’s–that led us both to become artistic, I hadn’t really plotted much further than this basic idea. I did not know what I actually would end up writing about, and whether what I wrote really would get to the heart of the Art Brothers premise. I had no idea why, for instance, my first post had to be about Speed Racer (other than the fact that it was such a big part of a certain section of my early years); I just knew it had to be.

Now that I’ve given it more thought, I realize that the influence of cars, California car culture, and all things car-related really did have a profound impact on my artistic outlook. For instance, David reminded me that I had a penchant, back in the day, to paint my old Hotwheels when they had become old, their paint chipped, their luster worn off. I would take a little bottle of enamel paint (I remember I had several colors–midnight blue, red, silver, gold, black), and I’d gussy them right back up.

After thinking about this, I realized that his habit came out of my interest in model cars–you know, of the sort where you buy a kit and glue the pieces together with model glue to make the whole. I did these kits very often as a kid–and though I’m certain I never did them very well, that didn’t matter so much. What I mostly loved was tweaking the designs to make them my own–painting them special colors, toying with the decals, etc. I remember in particular one model kit very clearly–a 1960ish Corvette–that I spraypainted (in the garage, of course) a sparkly candy-apple red (where these paints came from, and how I got my hands on them, I don’t know; my parents were often very hands-off, much to the benefit of my artistic development).

Here’s a good representation of what the Corvette ended up looking like (at least as I remember it in my head):

One could argue that my later artistic interest in paint, painting, gluing and collaging, and in certain cultural forms and certain shapes emerged from these early childhood car projects. Probably that’s oversimplifying things, but I will post (someday, when I find them) images of some of my earliest serious art work that reinforces the connection.