“It's not about the years honey, it's the mileage.”
- Harrison Ford
While there is a limit to how far gone a car can be to qualify for this mashup series, normally the more "driven" the look, the better. The visual aesthetic is consistent here, in the service of revealing beauty in decay. However, given the subject matter, the aim is to be more direct and visceral: kick the tires, smell the musty odors and burnt oil, and resist the urge to scrape off the flaking paint and polish the chrome. For some bonus content related to this series, check out Getting Up to Speed and Driven Diaries.
Bodywork
The term bodywork refers not to restoration, but to reinterpretation. Each metal skin acts as a canvas. Surface damage becomes design, and inconsistencies become character. What remains is stripped of function, but rich with presence.
Detailing
Where Bodywork shows the big picture, Detailing zooms in. This section isolates elements that might otherwise be overlooked, such as door handles, trim, glass, chrome, and paint flakes. The compositions here are closer to abstraction, built from fragments that have been removed from their mechanical context. They're about revealing the visual intensity that lives in the periphery: the edge, the corner, the surface detail that says more than the whole.
It's a Gas
...as in gas doors, that is. Each composition below is a mashup of multiple fuel doors processed to bring out painterly rhythms of color, shape, and corrosion, drawing a visual parallel to abstract painting of the 1960s and '70s. Think Rothko with oxidation. Diebenkorn with primer.
Test Drives
Source images for mashups can be nice enough to stand on their own. Here are a few examples from this series I took time to "polish up."
