Hop inside, strap on your seatbelt, and zoom into Andrew Artman’s wild and wonderful world where cars are the epicenter. 

In Andrew’s exhibition The Diet Starts Tomorrow, cars are real life time machines, everyday portals into bygone eras and fictional worlds rich with detail, humor, and emotion. Older vehicles are works of art, Andrew believes, not just means of transportation but sacred pop culture relics.

In his drawings, cars are parked in movie sets, landscapes, and scenes from his early life, like his grandparents living room on Christmas morning — all brimming with personal jokes and anecdotes. Uncle Buck, Jim Henson, John Candy, Fred Flintstone, Rod Serling, and Don Draper are amongst the license-wielding icons that appear in Andrew’s vehicular vignettes, at the wheel, riding shotgun or in the bed of a Ford F100 pickup truck.

Andrew, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, draws on a cluttered desk, covered with heaps of car magazines, miniature world flags, and plenty of Hot Wheels. He clears off a square of space, grabs a pillow from his kitchen table to sit on, turns on a fan for white noise, and gets to work. Starting with pencil on paper, he often scribbles on the sheet’s backside so he can’t give up and start again on the other side mid-way through. After populating the page with details spanning every nook and cranny, he outlines with a ballpoint pen, carefully reinforcing the lines again and again until “nothing looks weak or tepid.” He can go so hard, Andrew reinforces his paper’s backside with dense layers of scotch tape, to ensure no rippage or crinkling occurs.

Andrew’s drawing, Don't Destroy A Good Thing, inspired by the 1987 erotic thriller Fatal Attraction about an affair gone horribly awry, stars a 1976 Chevy Vega, the model rented by Michael Douglas’ character in the film. “A very mediocre car,” according to Andrew. ‘80s memorabilia plucked from the film and drawn from memory are artfully crammed onto the paper, including a tape recorder, cassette tape, and file labeled “things not to tell my wife.” Cheeky text snippets like “protect the rabbit” and ceramic objects “resembling the male anatomy” wink to viewers in on the joke.

The show’s title, The Diet Starts Tomorrow, references Ford’s 1970s reluctance to follow in the footsteps of other auto giants like GM and discontinue their “big boat” cars. Instead, Ford catered to Americans who loved their big cars and delayed the downsizing for two additional years. The title also speaks to Andrew’s maximalist practice which leaves no detail untended to and no line unbolded.

Buckle up and accelerate into Andrew’s saturated racetrack of signs and signifiers, objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear.

Enormous thanks to JG Buckel and Brina Thurston for the beautiful video and Nate Langston Palmer for the gorgeous portraits of Andrew.