The Lincoln did not come in gray primer. Much surface rust necessitated a change for the better. The vehicle eventually ended up festooned in garlands of fancy and fantasy but this transition started tentatively, as with the Quirky B's. Unless one has absolutely no plan in mind, one does not jump right in and start re-facing. This is not to be confused with defacing which is destructive.The plan is not so much what one presumes will be the end result but rather, a plan to not let form and function get in the way. Hand-painting a car and attaching gee-gaws to it, crawling on all fours onto the room to create the aerial view, these are nor things permitted with the family vehicle. The car becomes a moving billboard, an object of art in and of itself.
By the time lettering was being done, grey primer had given way to flat black and the roof had been stripped of vestiges of padding and painted with that pebble-effect paint usually used along the rockers to prevent stone chips. Once again, I took something for use elsewhere and transposed it, bottom to top.
Had I any inkling that spending a summer decorating and redecorating what had become a huge, mobile canvass would lead, two years later, to a reintroduction of pop art to the 21st century? Not at all. What I do know is that there was a transition from this:
And then having whetted my appetite for re-facing so that on a particular and no doubt, peculiar evening, I took a keyboard, set it on my kitchen table and slathered flat black Tremclad all over it.
At first, this was more defacing than re-facing. Taking something that has a predetermined purpose and that to which anything liquid or with key-jamming possibilities: coffee, crumbs, liquid, ya, paint, is anathema, the sense of freedom by destroying, nay, repurposing the board's function was nothing short of amazing. Liberating!
Come back later to experience the transition from flat-black car parts to flat-black key boards, harbingers of today's all-new Pop Art movement.
Discover how I went from cruising the highway in one of the world's most comfortable vehicles, to having the information highway crash and burn on my kitchen table.
Thank-you, Shannon Lee
