Making the CAPitalism series

Following the NRL series’ completion I spanned a gap and started to use photos of the back-ends of cars I’d started making on 19 January when outside a friend’s yoga studio I snapped a photo of a Ford Ranger XLT. On 6 Feb I took a photo of the back-end of a Range Rover at the same spot. I used these two photos to make watercolours then stuck advertising slogans on them using collage. See below for the first two in the series.

The same friend who gets me to drive her to yoga said that the colours used in these didn’t reflect the subject of the ads, so I deliberately took photos of more colourful cars for the next ones. See below a Toyota Corolla, a Yaris, a Ford Mustang and a Toyota RAV4.

Making these car rear-ends with their flower-like light arrays, the hard plastic coloured in order to provide a signal to drivers behind, enabled me to explore the figurative in another way. While the NRL series had bordered on cartoon, the CAP series is resplendently real. I showed them to another friend and she was appreciative so to this point in time I’d gotten mainly positive feedback, for which I was grateful. 

This second friend is the same one who introduced me to Posca pens, which are used to put the drawings of pop music record albums on the paintings. Because I did the Posca marks in different colours I had to choose something that would show, and I’m not sure that I’m always successful in this.

I love bright colours it’s probably due to the Portuguese influence in my genetic makeup, so making the red and blue CAP paintings was a lot of fun. It’s always a trick to control the watercolours, and I was glad I’d bought different sets as well as individual tubes so that, say, for red I can choose slightly different hues to make up the design. Even the cheap Officeworks watercolours still get a show-in because those sets are the ones that contain the bright pink I sometimes use for highlights.