Chris Osborne Art

During my years in New York City, while working as the Jazz and Blues Retail Manager for Tower Records Lincoln Center, I often walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge, the perfect ending to a Manhattan day. In my mind’s eye I could see the builders of this magnificent structure working over a century ago, and later the pedestrians, trolley cars, and autos moving across. I often wondered where their spirit goes in the dimension of time, and I believed I could sense it around me as I paused to view the glistening water.

I feel the same way about the automobile, viewing its evolution over the same expanse of time. There is a story within each one, from the moment of assembly by working hands, to the pride and pleasure of ownership. The early automobile began with practicality and efficiency in mind, but it was the artistic flair that brought it to the level of great sculpture.

In my paintings, the volume of the automobile sweeps across the canvas, the hard edges take hold, masses of shape are crisp and formidable, and reflective surfaces appear. Adding people to the design juxtaposes the softer forms, the softer edges. There is a vulnerability and sweetness to the human form that not only appears in paint, but I believe enters our psyche as we seek the comfort zone of the automobile. Cars seem to envelop the body and often draw friends or family into their hulking space. Stating the obvious, they are larger than we are, but it is this very fact that underlines the impressive nature of sculpture throughout art history.

My father could never afford the best, but being an engineer, he treated his automobile like gold. The driveway was a place of mechanical, cleaning, and polishing activity, and we had a great time naming everything we saw on the road. One of my fondest memories of childhood is of sitting at my Dad’s workbench assembling plastic car models. Sometimes I feel like I am constructing cars in a similar way on canvas, piece by piece, trim put on last.

It is a wonderful feeling to have my art evolve to recall my early passion, the automobile. In the 1970’s, during my years in the art department at Bard College (on the Hudson River) and on through the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was creating abstract work influenced by the paramount New York styles growing out of the decades before. In the 1980’s, while working with Jane Lander Associates in New York representing illustrators in the advertising business, I was impressed by the quality of their figurative work. My own art shifted in this direction, and by the end of the decade I was drawing and painting people. Gradually it occurred to me that a portrait could be expanded to have the elements of a person’s life displayed, and I had occasion to paint people with their art deco furniture, or a piano, a typewriter, a saxophone, a pet.

Upon turning to the automobile, I was energized beyond anything before and the idea of a portrait became grand and colorful, and often enlarged to life size.

Biographies interest me; I am drawn to Hollywood life and films of the 1930’s and 1940’s, and equally inspired by the evolution of Jazz and Blues in American popular music. As any one of the creative and colorful people in these settings may choose a particular car or truck reflecting their personality, I must choose how to bring that combination forth on canvas; a process I enjoy immensely.

I may paint a venerable Blues or Jazz musician alongside a car of their time, or a 1930’s Hollywood personality with a car of the Golden Era. My intent is to pay tribute to the tapestry of American life as it has evolved decade by decade along with the changing design of the automobile. Whether it is a Mississippi highway or the streets of New York City, the automobile has rolled along, finding its way into song and lifestyle all across our country.