CNN
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Andrew Holmes's photographs of trucks on California highways are sun-drenched, saturated and crisp. Looking at the crystal-clear snapshots, you can almost hear the roar of the engines, feel the heat reflected off the shiny aluminum gas tanks, and smell the diesel wafting from the exhaust. But these aren't photographs: Each hyperreal image is actually a color pencil drawing, the result of 300 to 500 hours of careful creation. Now, Holmes's works have been brought together in a book — “Gas Tank City” (Circa Press) — to accompany a show of the same name at London's Architectural Association (AA).
Holmes trained as an architect: he attended the AA, and even worked with the late Richard Rogers in 1969 on the design for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. But Holmes has since made his name as a multimedia artist, having by his own admission been devoted to drawing since he was four years old. Raised in the English town of Bromsgrove, Holmes traveled to the US as a student, first photographing and painting what he saw in New York City, then moving to Los Angeles and Southern California. He became mesmerized by the interstate highway system: “I found that (it) was designed as a single object,” he explained over coffee in London. “It was 43,000 miles long (at the time of its original design in 1956)—the largest object ever designed in the world.”
In California, Holmes would regularly get in his car and drive on highways. It was the early 1970s. “In those days, driving was really a joy,” he said, comparing it with the increased traffic in recent years. He would go to truck stops and just watch: the gas stations, the vehicles, the roadside eateries and their signs. Some of them reminded him of going to the local train station as a kid in England, and seeing “these big things spewing steam” pull into the station. What he loves about trucks is the same sensory overload: “the sound, the smell, the shiny aluminum, the size of the things.”
The 100 illustrations that make up the “Gas Tank City” series seem to celebrate every inch of the trucks — especially the classic Kenworth models — from their huge radiator grilles to their “West Coast” side-view mirrors, and from the sweeping curves of their fenders to their constellations of lights.
The images are full of color and detail. In one, a red truck carrying two gleaming gas tanks is stopped at an angle; in the reflection of the mirror-like aluminum, we see the surrounding urban landscape, including the buildings across the street and a palm tree stretching into the blue sky, in meticulous detail. A red sign on the side of the truck warns of flammability; green and orange tubes are tied in place along the tanks; and every imperfection in the road or welding mark on the metal is brought into focus.
While driving, Holmes would use his camera to photograph fleeting creations that caught his eye, and then painstakingly transform them into observed paintings. Although the terms “hyperreal” and “photorealistic” are used to describe his work, Holmes explains that the paintings are “completely different from photographic images.”
He remembers being frustrated by the camera's shallow depth of field in the early 1970s: only one area would be in focus, while the rest of the image was blurry. “I realized that if you take three pictures” — identical in the frame but changing what's in focus — “you can make a picture in which everything is in focus.” Holmes's pictures display an apparent flatness of vision that we can see now with smartphone cameras, but that wasn't possible to capture on film at the time.
Drawing also gave him a chance to play with light and colour. “I used to make drawings from a 35mm (photographic) slide,” he said. “I would hold it up to the sunlight, so you could see the shadow areas.” He then made these parts of the image look as if they were artificially lit, causing the colours to take on an unrealistic saturation. The end result is “completely different” from a photograph. He said that when displayed together, the original photograph looks almost grey compared to the drawing.
While people aren't the subject of “Gas Tank City,” they're still involved in the series: Holmes would talk to the drivers of the trucks he built, chatting about his trips. “When I showed them a picture, they immediately got excited and we became friends,” he said. Then the drivers helped out — suggesting somewhere else Holmes could go where they might see a particularly cool truck stop or collection of vehicles.
Fifty years after beginning his work, Holmes continues to photograph the highway system, its trucks and its culture. Over the decades, camera technology has evolved: Holmes admits he now uses digital photographs as the basis for his paintings, but the works still demand hundreds of hours each. Somehow, the images from those early days don't look all that different from those made in recent years. Together, “Gas Tank City” creates a portrait of life on the road, untethered from the specifics of time and place.