I said earlier this month that there was one more vehicle and that it was the best of them. This is it, and it contains less car than any of the others.
A tail fin, cropped hard. Turquoise above, cream along the flank, the ribbed gold anodised panel running down the fin with the Bel Air script set into it, and a red tail light sitting at the bottom corner like a full stop. Another car sits behind in the top left, out of focus and out of the conversation.
You do not get to see what it is. You get the corner of it, and the corner is enough.
Why crop it that hard
Because a whole car is a portrait of an object, and a detail is a portrait of a surface. The interesting thing about a 57 Chevy was never its silhouette. It was that somebody decided a family saloon should have a fin, and then decided the fin should be two-tone, and then put a gold ribbed panel on it.
Cropping in says: look at this decision. It also means the shapes become abstract before you read them, which is why the painting holds up from across a room.
The turquoise
That colour is the whole painting and it was the hard part. Fifties automotive turquoise is not a simple blue-green. It is slightly chalky, it goes almost white where the light rolls over the top of the panel, and it picks up warmth from whatever is reflected in it.
In pastel the way to get there is not to find the right stick. It is to lay down three or four that are each wrong in a different direction and let them sit next to each other. Up close you can see them separately. From four feet away they resolve into one colour that no single stick would have given.
The cream flank is doing something similar in a quieter register, with pink and pale grey run through it where the light falls off.
The chrome and the red
The trim strip is not painted as silver. It is painted as a sequence of reflections, dark where it catches the road, bright where it catches the sky, and the eye assembles chrome out of that by itself.
The red light is small and it is the only genuinely warm thing in the lower half. Everything cool in the painting is measured against it.
On a wall
At 14 × 12 it is a proper piece. It suits a room with a bit of hard edge to it, and it reads as pure shape and colour from a distance before it resolves into a car, which is a good thing for a painting to do.
One original. The original is here and the print is here.
The other vehicles are in the vintage collection, and everything else is in the gallery.
— DawnE