Ancient Egypt meets ’50′s Car Culture

I have often been inspired by picture books. This was definitely the case for some of my early explorations of conceptual automotive design. The book “Dreamcars’ by Jean Piccard had a huge impact on me. I made a point to look for other books that covered styling from what I considered the golden age of design, the postwar fifties era. One prize possession in my book collection is a soft cover car  ‘primer’ put out by Post Productions, a small publishing house based in California in the 1950′s, that covered several automotive styling related areas.  The book that I have is about ‘studio’ type styling.

Post Publications book of automotive design

There are several others put out by Post that are about custom car restyling.  These are coveted by guys in the Hot Rod hobby.

One book that had a particular kind of impact on me was a catalogue of items that were featured in a well known show of Tutankhamens’ artifacts that were on display at various museums in the mid 1970’s. Once, as I was paging through it looking at a portrait bust of Tut in gold,

Catalogue from 1976 tour of Tut artifacts

I had a flash-I saw a ‘50’s car instead of a human face (I used to have cars on the brain all the time). I called the resulting sculpture “TutanCaddy”.

'TutanCaddy'

This piece was very popular, I made a number of them, at least 7 or 8.  It’s currently on the list of things I’m planning to enlarge and recast.

Advertisement