TRAVERSING THE LANDSCAPE
Collector’s Focus: Planes, Trains & Automobiles
Exploring is in our immigrant blood. Not content to hunker down on the East Coast, early Euro-Americans pushed west on horseback and in wagons. Wagon trains began heading west in 1820 with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail from St. Louis, Missouri. In the 1840s and ’50s, wagon trains reached the West Coast. In 1869 the first transcontinental railroad ran from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. In 1896 Henry Ford made his first experimental automobile and in 1908 introduced the Model T. The first transcontinental airplane flight took place in 1911. The country was open.
Santiago Michalek was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2003, in the U.S., he opened his own business restoring Volkswagen beetles and buses. He
expressed his love for VWs in paintings, having been drawing since he was a boy. The subjects for his paintings expanded to include subjects from horses to trains. Steam Engine Train (Locomotive 40) is a meticulously rendered image by a skilled artist with the passionate eye of a mechanic.
Out of the way places require the use of special kinds of planes. Ross Buckland was born in Calgary, Alberta. He built plastic models and drew airplanes when he was young and eventually became a pilot and gave flying lessons. Primarily self-taught as an artist, he combined his skills and his knowledge to paint a subject he loves. He knew that his planes needed a setting and studied the landscapes of other artists in books and at museums and was able to spend time with the Western landscape master Wilson Hurley.
Warm Welcome depicts a floatplane about to land on a remote mountain lake. Its pontoons allow it to land and take off on water. A hunting lodge with moose antlers at its peak and friends by a roaring fire welcome the plane, its passengers and, undoubtedly, much-needed supplies.
Robert LaDuke was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, on the banks of the Connecticut River. He now lives in Huntington Beach, California. In between is the vastness of the North American continent. He and his family traversed the country in their Cadillac with an Airstream attached.
He says his work “is pretty much transportation oriented, trains, ships, cars, trailers, everything that rolls or floats and they always have that nostalgic ’40s look to them.” Planes, trains and automobiles in motion fill his nostalgic compositions. He says, “I enjoy creating narratives with multiple meanings in my work. I imagine
that a certain dark but humorous tone underlies my cartoonlike illustrative surfaces. Although realism often dominates my work visually, it is in fact merely providing a frame of reference to a metaphoric end.”
Born near Liverpool, England, and now living in the California desert, Nicola Wood is a preeminent painter of classic automobiles. She graduated from the Royal College of Design and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her career has included fashion and wallpaper design as well as a book cover for Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana. Living in Los Angeles in 1981, she saw a black ’59 Cadillac parked near her house. She felt compelled to paint it and the rest, as they say, is history. Wood is a five-time winner of the Athena Award of Excellence, the most sought-after recognition in the automotive fine art world.
Big Sur shows two classic cars from the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, California, parked on the cliffs above the Pacific. The extraordinary red 1939 Delahaye Type 165 was built in France to represent the country at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The engine wasn’t finished in time for the exhibition, so it was shown as an empty chassis, with no one being the wiser. In 1985 Peter Mullin and Jim Hull found and purchased the original V-12 engine to install in their restored classic. The car in the foreground is a 1934 Avion Voisin Type C27 Roadster.
From tough industrial locomotives to elegant roadsters, the depictions of planes, trains and automobiles impress us with their artistic skill and feed our native wanderlust.
In this special collector’s focus, readers will find works that transport, as well as learn about the inspiration behind the art.
Having been the only licensed artist
with Lionel Trains LLC for almost 30 years, Angela Trotta Thomas’ main focus is about traditions being passed down for many generations to come. Her paintings have always revolved around the child’s part in these traditions. The artist says, “I am most interested in the emotional attachment that the child has for these treasures and the traditions that they have forged. I strive to capture a dreamlike state with my paint application so viewing the paintings can take the viewer to another time and place.” Thomas is represented by Mary Martin Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina. The Allis Chalmers tractor painted by Charlie Hunter is on display, and is occasionally used, at Lautenbach’s Orchard. “I painted it start-to-finish one warm morning this July as part of the 2018 Door County Plein Air event,” Hunter says, and the painting was awarded the first place prize. “Mr. Lautenbach loves that this tractor has a hand-choke, making it perfect for watering young fruit trees. I love the swoop of the sheet metal into the gas tank.”
“I am constantly inspired by the entire act of painting,” says Kate KilpatrickMiller. “From the first brush to canvas, it is my heart, mind and soul being shared with those viewing and interpreting my work.” The artist’s Living the Life and Mile Marker 821 portray vintage cars in golden fields, prompting a sense of nostalgia from the viewer.
Macey Lipman’s Cuban Urban Experience series highlights the lavish hotels, exciting music and vintage cars of the country, but, Lipman says, “the 60-some years of communist rule has put a very gray-toned pallor on the image of Cuba.” Beginning his artistic process by taking photographs, Lipman says, “I hired
a driver and played hooky from the cultural schedule and went to parts of Havana that few tourists would dare visit. This included streets lined with crumbling buildings of former glorious mansions (some dangerously close to collapse) now filled with Cubans living in the neglected ruins for free since it’s a communist country. Somehow the buildings’ former beauty still shines through.”
In Rox Corbett’s Buick and the Beast, a mountain lion perches atop an aging car. The piece won first place in the twodimensional art category at the 2017 Cowgirl Up! Western Art Show and Sale, and Buffalo Bill Center of the West curator Karen McWhorter notes, “Beyond the appeal of the subject matter, the judges were impressed by Corbett’s ability to depict a variety of textures and tones so adroitly with only charcoal and the white of the paper, expertly conveying an opaque fragment of a broken windshield, the velvet folds of the animal’s coat, and the twisted, tangled vines and branches.”
Terzian Galleries in Park City, Utah, features the aircraft works of Zachary Proctor. “My intent as a painter is to arrest motion on canvas by artificial means, to capture life and hold it fixed. I am interested in making paintings of personal experiences, some as I remember and others as I prefer to remember them,” Proctor says. “I aim to create a nostalgic world I once imagined, now conceivable and constructed with paint. As I reflect on memories, I hope to bring to life a personal mythology to better understand my reality.”