Andrea Foster

Art Car Dreams...& Schemes

There is no feeling more freeing than loading up a caulking gun to glue stuff to your car. Take it from me! I am an art car artist, and my '74 Ford Pinto had 4 different incarnations. If you have a vehicle that runs good but looks bad, you have the perfect vehicle to convert into a beautiful, roving art piece. Converting your car can take months or weeks, but often, due to weather concerns, artists are ratcheting up their glue guns the day before a parade, to make sure the items are freshly but solidly adhered before the big day. And, in my case, since I was gluing books onto my car, (I am known as The Booklady, and my car was known as the Bookmobile) the weather report was always crucial. I lived in Houston, where rain can be a daily occurrence, and you can imagine what happens if you affix a paperback book to the side of a car. The book gets wet, and your object of decoration now becomes a soggy mess—and sometimes, most often, falls off the car, leaving only the back cover and final page of the book—somewhat fitting in an odd sort of way.