Framed dimensions: 13 × 10

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This is part of my new series, Women in Cars.  These paintings with one collage element - a car ad from a vintage magazine - explore the idea of escapism in a brief, concise plot that often has no resolution. This is an ongoing series that I have been making for the last decade by starting with a vintage car ad, then painting a new and uncertain background for these drivers. Each painting in this new series comes in a vintage frame that I have collected and paired with the car image. In Susan Cain’s book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, she writes: 

“And maybe you crave perfect and unconditional love — the kind that is depicted in all those iconic advertisements of a glamorous [woman] driving their convertible around a bend to nowhere. But maybe you are starting to realize that the heart of those ads is not the dazzling [woman], but rather the invisible place to which [her] shiny car is driving. That just around that curve, the perfect and beautiful world awaits [her]; that in the meantime, a flame of it is lit inside [her]. …And maybe you see that the [woman] will never arrive. And if [she does, she] won’t get to stay. …The world the [woman] is driving to is forever around the bend. And what should we do with this tantalizing truth?”