"Art Cars"--vehicles festooned with concepts and gewgaws of one kind or another--are a tiresome genre. I speak as a car guy. There are exceptions, Shawn HibmaCronan's Ford Falcon van project, "Love, Inertia, and the Perfect Stance", being one. On the other hand, artists' cars are sort of interesting. A few years ago, when I was on the art colony circuit---Yaddo, Macdowell, Ucross, VCCA--I noticed that artists, often enough out of NYC--tended to drive roomy, battered, nondescript Outer Borough street cars, vans, and pickup trucks. Those gravel parking lots at Saratoga Springs and Peterbrough usually had a scrappy, no-fuss, utilitarian air, filled as they were with the dented, unshiny cars that my people had bought with money from the last or first painting they'd sold, or a scrap of grant money, or a teaching gig. Or maybe they'd inherited the wheels from their grandmother because there certainly were a lot of grandmotherly cars: Oldsmobile sedans, etc. My sister Mary Behrens, another Colony habitué, used to drive a mid-Seventies Chevy wagon. I'm glad to see the artist Mary-Louise Geering keeping a proud bohemian tradition alive with her stylish early-80s Buick Skylark.
Trucks, cars, highways, landscape, good writing. "You cannot travel on the path, before you have become the Path itself."
PHB
- autoliterate
- Brooklin, Maine, United States
- We own a 1975 GMC Sierra Grande 15 in Maine and a 1986 Chevrolet Custom Deluxe 10 in West Texas. Also a pair of 1997 Volvo 850 wagons. Average age in the fleet is 28 years--we're recycling. I've published 3 novels: THE LAW OF DREAMS (2006), THE O'BRIENS (2012), and CARRY ME (2016). Also 2 short story collections: NIGHT DRIVING(1987) and TRAVELLING LIGHT (2013). More of my literary life is at www.peterbehrens.org I was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study for 2012-13. I'm an adjunct professor at Colorado College and in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. In 2015-16 I was a Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Autoliterate office is in Car Talk Plaza in Harvard Square, 2 floors above Dewey Cheatem & Howe. SUBSCRIBE TO THE AUTOLITERATE DAILY EMAIL by hitting the button to the right.
Monday, August 25, 2014
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