Back in the mid-eighties I came across a book called “The Red Couch”. Two photographic installation artists had taken a red couch around America, inviting people, rich and poor, famous, infamous and not-famous, to sit upon it and to be photographed in various locations. Brief essays about these personalities accompanied the images.
The whole enterprise added up to an eccentric portrait of the country, but I was never quite convinced a red couch was the appropriate icon for America - almost immediately I wanted to re-do the project with a different actor in the leading role: a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham. On my travels around the country this vehicle had always caught my eye; its size alone gave it a certain aura, but it also had an attractive design, which combined strong lines and subtle curves. From nineteen-seventy nine onwards, General Motors made this model for thirteen years with only minimal cosmetic changes.
In the early eighties one would generally see sleek examples parked outside exclusive establishments in the better parts of town, and they also featured in Hollywood movies as the chosen ride of corporate oligarchs, mob bosses, pampered politicians and drug czars. However, as the decade progressed, the earliest vehicles off the production line had begun to slip down the auto-buyers’ food chain. In Beverly Hills, at the residence of a acquaintance, the housecleaner was observed arriving for work in a burgundy coupe, and on a sketching trip in rural Arkansas, an imposing black sedan was spotted outside a sway-backed shack scarcely larger than the automobile itself. Somehow each sighting stirred memories of my Red Couch syndrome.
Twenty years on, one might still observe stubbornly conservative retired dentists and their blue-rinse consorts from Palm Beach to La Jolla, heading for the golf course or doctor’s appointments in immaculate low-mileage examples, even as low-rent urban hustlers make do with rusted-out, smoking warhorses.
The car’s film career seemed to mirror its changing role in the real world. In “American Yakuza” Japanese gangsters ride around LA in a sleek black example, whereas in “Love The Hard Way”, Adrien Brody playing a hip New York scam artist, drives a sky-blue model, as he commutes to shake down visiting Japanese executives. In the recent film “Tulley”, a Kansas farmhand owns a rusting, dilapidated model, the hood of which serves as a love couch when he takes his stripper girlfriend for a ride in the woods.
Late in 2004, a NASA scientist who had bought two of my road paintings, asked if I would do some commissioned work in New Mexico where he had grown up. The suggestion coincided with a fund-raiser at Long Beach Museum in California, which included one of my pieces. A reunion in Phoenix of my wife’s scattered family also beckoned. Finally it seemed that the time for Red Couch Redux had arrived - it was now or never,
Time was short, but three possible vehicles were found on the Internet, and whittled down to one. A white sedan with blue velour interior was acquired from Temecula Auto Sales near San Diego, and taken to Matt’s Caddyshack, where a golf cue was extracted from a fuel breather line, and she was given a tune-up. Fresh from the workshop we headed east. Six thousand miles later, after a lifetime of soft Southern Californian living, this venerable beast has now endured its first winter on the cruel shores of New England. A sad end is the traditional fate for an artist’s muse, but perhaps I can repay her through my art. After all, America is the land where fame is the ultimate reward, and perhaps my paintings will cause this great white whale to be remembered long after she has gone to meet her maker in the scrap metal piles on the banks of the Piscataqua River.
