Belair (2002) Painting by John Chan

The subject:
A 1957 Chevrolet Belair Sport Coupe, one of the more iconic coupes of the era sporting Jet Age inspired tail-fins. The automotive designs emerging from Detroit during the post-war period coincided with an era of optimism and economic prosperity for middle class Americans and the nostalgia for that time period persists for many to this present day, embodied in the surviving artifacts of those bygone days.
The series:
An approach to landscape painting in the context of our relationship with the surrounding environment, mediated by technologies that shape our perception of it. The automobile becomes the prism through which we experience much of our immediate environs of the car centric culture here in California. Reflections of an urban landscape on the quintessential American artifact conveys the idea of image within image, of the profound residing within the seductive artificiality of chrome and lacquer. The painting explores the nature of seeing, of how our fetishized technologies seduce vision and contributes to cultural blindness and dislocation, as expressed by the abstract space that the car resides in, an indeterminate plane.
The technique:
In my final year in art school, we were encouraged to step away from modern painting practices and experiment with the painting techniques of the old masters such as Rembrandt and da Vinci. I became enamored by the glazing, scumbling, and veils employed by these artists. This painting was executed with a pure glazing technique. Multiple layers of transparent paint are meticulously laid down on the pure white canvas. The resulting paint surface allows light to penetrate the transparent layers and reflects off the white ground of the canvas back toward the viewers eye, producing a glow similar to the visual effect of stained glass. 80 hours of work has gone into this painting. The canvas is stretched over wood panel to facilitate the glazing process and also provides rigidity and protection for the back of the canvas.

Related themes

PhotorealismAmericanaChromeClassic CarTail Fin