Philip Hall

What intrigues and stimulates me is how shadows detail life, enhancing or diminishing perceptions or emotional reactions to my artwork. Reality is defined in my work by revealing the mystery of an image — it’s light and shadow — through crystallizing or distorting pixels until the inherent beauty of an image is revealed.

Using my original photography or 3-dimensional scans, I manipulate my images with the tools in Photoshop.   Rather than using brushes, paint and canvas, I have a new set of digital tools that I use as a painter would use a brush; layering, distorting, sharpening, softening, bending, blurring, filtering, multiplying, adjusting, embossing, extruding, texturing and light painting. All the work is printed on high quality paper, canvas or aluminum, and uses only high quality, acid free mats and backing materials.

My artwork is not about cars. My artwork is about the light and the dark, shape, color, hard and soft, satire, spirituality, sensuality and Painting with Light. Cars are simply the vehicle I am using to drive my art to the physical.

Philip Hall's Dreamin at the Ritz

Troy Paiva

Photographer Troy Paiva captures the disappearing mad-made world with his evocative and surreal night-photography technique. He uses simple hand-held lighting techniques to create brilliantly lit tableaus of the abandoned debris of a modern, disposable culture. His photography has appeared in countless books, magazines and CD’s including two monographs: “Lost America” published by Motorbooks International, and "Night Vision" published by Chronicle Books

Wandering the deserted backroads of the American Southwest, Troy Paiva has explored the abandoned underbelly of America since the 1970s. Since 1989 he’s been taking pictures of it . . . at night, by the light of the full moon.

A multi-discipline artist, Troy needed to find a new medium to create personal art while he worked in a heavily art directed graphic design job. Sitting in on a few night photography classes, he had a revelation when the subject of light-painting came up. Here were techniques that would be perfect for capturing the atmosphere and mystery of the modern ghost towns and epic junkyards he was already exploring.

After years of development, Troy's early vision has been fully realized through his unique style and technique. The colored lighting is done with a flashlight or strobe flash masked with theatrical lighting gels. It's effect reanimates these dead places, turning them into mutant tableaus of some vaguely familiar parallel universe. The minutes-long exposures allow the stars to spiral around Polaris and the moving clouds to smear ethereally across the sky. Many of these subjects are already gone; bulldozed, burned down, subdivided, melted for scrap or simply vanished beneath the shifting desert sand.

While there are minor digital adjustments to some of the photographs, the lighting effects are all done “in-camera” during the exposure. These images are not Photoshop creations.

Christopher Peterson

My motivation to paint began with early childhood experiences growing up in the New England suburbs in the early 1960's. Like many Americans of our time, we traveled, and valued the many parts of the world we had seen. I was fascinated with the infrastructure of this great mobility that we shared. I loved cars, roads, airplanes, buildings and cities and often wondered how they worked and how they were made. I was much less concerned with their meanings and consequences than I was with their design. Being New England as it was, I was also fascinated with the juxtaposition of our country's historical origins and the modern developed world.

Many of these early experiences included trips to New York City to see the world's great art museums and galleries. There I saw the work of the great artists whose paintings marked the development of our culture through time. By the time I was a teenager, I knew I had a facility for drawing and I began to put together the idea that I could somehow fit into this scenario. It was a time when painting had moved from impressionism to cubism to abstraction and back again. Music was at an all-time high point. Andy Warhol made mass-produced commercialism cool, and I could see how he influenced other painters, designers and commercial artists. The photorealists took it a step further and celebrated American banality and decay with cold hard technical precision. I loved the honesty of this work, and I could see the connection with earlier artists like N.C. and Andrew Wyeth, Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargeant and Winslow Homer. In fact, I can see that if it were not for the great success of these artists, it could not possibly even occur to me to make paintings at all.

So it is with this perspective that I paint today. I use Acrylic paint because it is cleaner and easier to use than oil, and every bit as permanent. My technique is fresh, realistic, colorful and painterly. I have developed a wide array of tools, using photography, the computer, drawings and sketches, and I'm always learning new methods and approaches to develop imagery. Much of it comes from stream-of-consciousness snapshots, photographs and drawings. I find that the most compelling and successful pieces are the ones which are less influenced by other art, but arise from the most personal experiences, which are of course the most universal.

Chris Peterson's Sebastopol Chevy

Bill Silveira

Slightly curmudgeonly, a bit on the eccentric side, with a maniacal enthusiasm for the automobile since his early youth, Bill Silveira enjoys making art out of discarded auto parts, rusty scrap metal, and other unique items that seem to find their way into his vast collection of interesting and eclectic junk.

A resident of Oakland's Jingletown arts district since the early 1990's, Bill likes to think of himself as "Sanford and Son-ish with a slightly twisted bent." When not working on his welded metal sculptures, you may find him with a paintbrush in hand creating something usually inspired by the automobile with acrylic paints.

Additionally, this semi-retired used car dealer is also well known in the filming industry as the guy who can provide you with just about anything you need from classic cars to caskets for your shoot. It's also been rumored that he's worked for wine and cheese in his not-so-distant past, but that fact hasn't been wholly substantiated just yet.

-text and photo from the blog of Kim Larson

 

Bill Silveira

Lulu Torbet

So how did it come to this—my obsession with these repainted, scratched, cracked, rusted, epoxied battered cars? I’ve been taking pictures for years, but something about moving to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with its shimmery light and visual delights, opened my eyes to the profound pleasures of the material world. I’m ever on the prowl for those moments when the light invites me to appreciate my everyday world anew.

I’m seduced by tricks of light and color-infused shadows, attracted to ambiguity and things-not-as-they-seem. My emphasis is on the aesthetic and compositional qualities of my images. When I find a subject that intrigues me, I’m hooked. I tend to think in terms of series: I shoot the layered, luminous tarpaulins overhanging the market stalls; the complex tangles of wires, shredded banners and washlines; and now, these decaying cars.
The images are unaltered (except for cropping and color balance).

The last line of a favorite Harry Nillson song, “The Most Beautiful World in the World,” goes: “Tell her she’s beautiful, roll the world over, and give her a kiss…and a feel.” I want my photos to illuminate for viewers the ordinary beauty that is—always—right in front of our eyes.

 

 

Lulu Torbet's Port City/Midnight