The story behind this painting, entitled “Grapefruit Truck,” begins a long time ago. Ready Mr. Peabody, we’re going to set the Way-back-machine to February of 1974. It had been below zero in Minneapolis for weeks on end and I had just finished my second semester at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Suffering from a bad case of freshman stress syndrome, and miserable with acute eczema exacerbated by the arctic conditions of that Minnesota winter, I was definitely ready for a change.
My college roommate Darrell Poore, was from Anderson South Carolina. The meat locker weather and the Foundation Studies program at MCAD had not been agreeing with Darrell’s southern disposition either. We were both looking for a way out. We found it, however it wasn’t exactly Spring Break.
There was a knock on the apartment door and in walked Darrell’s old buddy Kenny from back in Anderson. Totally unexpected, it was one of those out of the blue coincidences that wind up changing the course of your life. Kenny was traveling with his Navy buddy Tony, who provided the transportation — a metal-flake green ’69 Camaro. Kenny and Tony were on their own little Spring Break adventure. Together we hatched a plan to move to Daytona Beach. Sure sounded good to us! Cue the music; Little Walter: “I got the key to the highway, billed out and bound to go, I’m gonna leave here runnin’ ’cause, walkin’s way too slow…” There was only one problem. Kenny and Tony were AWOL from the US Navy at the time. Darrell and I didn’t worry too much about that. Here were some cats with wheels that could get us out of here.
And so we were off. Road trip!: two art-school-dropout hippies, a couple of fugitive sailors, and all our possessions stuffed into a muscle car speeding into the night toward the promised land of warm white beaches, cold beer and bikini clad babes. If you’ve ever ridden in the back seat of a sixties Camaro, you know that cramped quarters is an understatement. We drove straight-on, non-stop, sharing “sleeping” and driving shifts. You can do that when you’re twenty. My driving shift came at dawn; finally a chance to extend my arms and legs! The swelling violins of Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra and “Love’s Theme” poured out of the AM radio as the sun rose and we left the frozen Midwest. I felt better already.
Completed in 1976, the Grapefruit Truck painting represents all the warmth and abundance of Florida. I chose to begin my story with this piece because it represents a pivotal turning point in my work and it is the first painting executed in my so-called mature style. In my high school and early college days I had explored painting in a variety of styles and techniques. I tried painting in the styles of abstract expressionism, impressionism, cubism and most notably, surrealism. I was, like so many young artists at the time, very caught up in the whole psychedelic scene. I made a lot of art that attempted to capture the feeling of being on LSD. By the early seventies I had taken my last acid trip and had begun admiring the work of the emerging school of Photorealism. I was looking at the work of guys like Don Eddy, Richard Estes, and Ralph Goings. I liked their crisp painting style and was taken with how very American their subject matter was.
