Artists' Cars: Mary-Louise and the Buick Skylark

"Art Cars"--vehicles festooned with concepts and gewgaws of one kind or another--are a tiresome genre. I speak as a car guy. There are exceptions, Shawn HibmaCronan's Ford Falcon van project, "Love, Inertia, and the Perfect Stance", being one.  On the other hand, artists' cars are sort of interesting. A few years ago, when I was on the art colony circuit---Yaddo, Macdowell, Ucross, VCCA--I noticed that artists, often enough out of NYC--tended to drive roomy, battered, nondescript Outer Borough street cars, vans, and pickup trucks. Those gravel parking lots at Saratoga Springs and Peterbrough usually had a scrappy, no-fuss, utilitarian air, filled as they were with the dented, unshiny cars that my people had bought with money from the last or first painting they'd sold, or a scrap of grant money, or a teaching gig. Or maybe they'd inherited the wheels from their grandmother because there certainly were a lot of grandmotherly cars: Oldsmobile sedans, etc. My sister Mary Behrens, another Colony habitué, used to drive a mid-Seventies Chevy wagon. I'm glad to see the artist Mary-Louise Geering keeping a proud bohemian tradition alive with her stylish early-80s Buick Skylark.