Broken Records and Cadillac Kisses

After a long drive from Dallas to Amarillo, hours in a topless and doorless Jeep left me windburned sunburned and desiring a way back, like on a Greyhound. Persistence prevailed over cowardly retreat and proved the juice, that was the hundreds of miles of pavement in the blazing ass sun, was worth the squeeze.

I created the Cadillac XO (above) and the three below in 2020 using pealed off enamel from the cars at Cadillac Ranch, pieces of my dead’s leather jacket, and pieces from some paintings that I had torn apart to compose on the 78 rpm records..

Use of record albums to create art was not a new venture. I had used a 78 to carve into for a relief print and for paintings. And in my childhood, my brothers and I used them in performance art when we tossed them from our yard and into our neighbors houses.

Yellow Carnation 2018

The significance of records as a surface to paint on can be traced back to my early years of painting at the Used Car Studio above my uncle’s paintball shop. In 2006, I was working at paintball and I saw this Blue Bird bus driver parked just out side the door with the engine running. I drew him and then spray painted a vinyl silver and painted him on there in black. Other times, I used them to make the bike gang logo for the WMD’s. If I were painting in my car the records were often used as palates.

The record motif found its way onto canvas and into film for my animation Ignition (2008). The canvas was made to have the animation projected onto it as if it were a moving painting. To reference rock’n’roll and Loony Toons I painted circles onto the canvas in pink on the raw canvas (Home Depot drop cloth). The smallest circles were the size of the record label, the 7” 45, the 12” 33 1/3 and got bigger from there. In Ignition, I also animated a 78 spinning with painted and spray painted teeth. The palate (above) made its way in there, as well.

At the end of a side, it keeps spinning that white noise. I doubt this will be the end of my record paintings but for now, that clean circle that lends itself so well to abstraction will have to wait to be turned over.