 |
| Left I always liked this strobe-effect painting. |
I can remember seeing these stunning Pontiac ad paintings in the Saturday Evening Post in the sixties and I actually kept a couple of the strobe ads and mounted them on cardboard (still have them somewhere) so this book was an obvious buy for me.
The book's title doesn't refer to Pontiac because it's about the creative work of Art and Van for Mercury, Buick, Pontiac, and Opel. All the cars look remarkable but I thought the Mercury and Buick backgrounds and especially the people, looked rather flat. Van's background and people look much more real in the Pontiac paintings because there is more brushwork to create more rounded figures. On page 116, the painting of a 1964 Bonneville Safari at a ski lodge includes ten people and they look very credible. Incidentally, this painting has had the top and bottom cropped.
The book has an elegant layout and is printed with a two-hundred screen on matt-art paper. I wish, though, that the author had included some largeish thumbnails of the Pontiac brochures the dealers distributed. Both artists (and their three associates) painted dozens of pictures for the brochures, often with cars cropped according to the text. Also, an index would have been useful.
US
No comments:
Post a Comment