San Marcos, Texas – Every so often, Scott Wade will drive his Mini Cooper up and down the rough, gravelly road near his Texas Hill Country home.
But Wade isn’t taking pass after pass to test his shocks or for the thrill of the ride. He needs the dust for art’s sake.
Wade, with his scraggly graying hair and a fondness for shirts with wacky prints, doesn’t wash his car when it first develops a fine coating of limestone dust. For the past four years he’s created art on it instead.
The self-proclaimed “dirty-car artist” uses typical tools such as brushes to “paint” surprisingly detailed works on the rear windshields of his Mini and Mazda.
But this isn’t the “Wash me now!” or team mottos that grace dusty jalopies all across America. Wade has painted a good likeness of the Mona Lisa, superimposed over a replica of van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” Less highfalutin is his rendition of the black-velvet classic of dogs playing poker. Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” is also represented in the dusty canvas of a Mini Cooper windshield.
Rather than applying paint or charcoal to his “canvas,” Wade, 48, reveals the glass windshield and dark interior of the car by removing dust.
“Every time they see a window, people can’t resist,” said Wade, who lives with his wife, Robin Wood, and daughter in the hills near San Marcos.
Wade’s first drawings turned out simple and cartoonlike because he used his finger. Then he experimented one day with a frayed Popsicle stick and he realized he could get a whole range of gray tones to create more complex pieces.
“It wasn’t a conscious decision to develop a new art form,” he said. “It was just looking for art in everything.”
