The Coolness of Cars = The Coolness of Art October 25, 2007

So, to continue–just a bit longer–this discussion of how cars, car culture, and my childhood love of Hotwheels and all things automobilic influenced my burgeoning interest in art, I want to talk about fifth grade.

In fifth grade, I became friends with a guy named Thomas (pictured here, from my fading fifth grade class photo):

Thomas was the first friend who became a partner-in-crime, with whom I had similar enough sensibilities that we began to encourage each other’s interests and talents. By this I mean, as all the other boys were comparing notes on which was their favorite NFL team and which girl they hated the most, he and I drew pictures, wrote stories, and made up games that only we two appreciated.

I don’t mean to put too much of a fine point on this, but Thomas was probably my first artistic collaborator. One thing we often did share with each other were our drawings of cars and car-related stuff. For instance, Thomas invented the “race-track drawing,” which quickly became a staple of our classtime doodling and note-passing. This was a drawing of a fantasy race track for cars, rendered from a bird’s-eye view looking down at the race in progress.

We spent a lot of time drawing these over multiple sheets of paper that we would tape together, and we ever were competing with each other to come up with ever-more creative trappings on our courses–jumps, loop-de-loops, chasms, shark ponds, rough terrain, etc–and ever-more outlandish race cars.

I have no idea what happened to Thomas–where he ended up going to school or where he lives now–as my family moved an hour east in the middle of that school year. I never saw Thomas or any of those kids again, and, lacking my artistic collaborator, I gave up making race track drawings altogether…

And while I’m not saying that the race-track drawings were any kind of great art, I should add that fifth grade was the year that I first began to be widely identified–by parents, grandparents, teachers, fellow students–as someone with “artistic talent.” The school art teacher–who came in to teach lessons only once a week usually–actually asked my parents if she could give me private lessons, a luxury we could not really afford at the time.

As proof of this growing art-identity, consider this–my class photo from that year. You’ll note the artistic trappings on my shirt; those are paint brushes:

Man, I liked that shirt. I wouldn’t mind having one like it today.

Reveries, revelations… October 18, 2007

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.