Growing up in Salt Lake City in the 60s, my father would buy us a new car every two years. The cars were big convertibles, usually a Ford or Mercury. They represented the height of style of the era, with vinyl seats and lots of highly polished chrome.

In hindsight, the cars exist as icons from my childhood. Each car represents a particular chapter of my youth. One of the most important associated memories were the family vacations, the whole family packed into the car for hours on end.

As a cultural symbol the cars of this period manifested the fantasies about who we were as a people and where we were going. This era glorifies our love affair with speed and travel, not to mention, it was a golden age for advertising. To come back full circle, these paintings of cars are meant to conjure up ideas encapsulated in the American middle class of the 1960s that still reverberate today.

“The car has become… an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.”

– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964