Driving Her Art
By Marshall GordonPhoto by Rimas Zailskas
Collectors, don’t get your hopes up. Sure, it’s a vintage 1966 Plymouth Fury III convertible with all original parts. And, it boasts a brand new paint job. But for Mona Groban, it’s not about the car — it’s about art.
When Mona bought it in 2002, she had absolutely no interest in wading into the heady world of vintage collectibles. She was simply looking for a large canvas, preferably one she could paint and take with her wherever she went. The Fury was the biggest, cheapest thing she could find.
It was a logical choice for something to get around in when Mona decided to move from the cold winters of Milwaukee to the warmth of the Outer Banks. What could be better than a large “beachmobile” with lots of paintable all-white sheet metal?
“I didn’t want something ordinary that everybody else drives. I was moving to the beach and I needed a car. It was old. It was funky. It was affordable. It was a convertible,” Mona says.
Mona is an artist, specializing in hand-painted shoes, clothing and accessories. She hand paints in a style that can be best described as something between Pop art and the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
Nothing dark, deep or provocative. Just colorful, fanciful, playful and joyous, filled with whimsical flowers, patterns, circles, squares, stripes, polka dots and swirls, all painted in vivid, deeply contrasting blues, purples, lavenders, chartreuses, reds, aquamarines, blacks, whites and greens.
Mona doesn’t stop with shoes, handbags, and clothes; virtually anything can end up as a potential canvas for her colorful visions: walls, chairs, sofas, floors, picket fences, house and garage exteriors. And, of course, the Fury, which incorporates the colors and designs used in her other art.
As she drove her Fury from Milwaukee to the Outer Banks, Mona studied the various areas of the car — hood, trunk, side-panels — and visualized what sort of patterns and colors would look best on a particular part. She decided that Zebra stripes, for example, would look great on the hood. Since she was near the ocean, the sides were painted with wavy blue swirls and leaves, the trunk golden with her signature patterns and shapes.
You would think with all the thought put into her design, Mona would carefully select a cutting-edge automotive lacquer and apply it with the precision tools found in body shops. Nope. Her paint and tools of choice: ordinary, everyday house paint and good old fashioned paint brushes. “I painted it because it’s a white car with rust spots. In the winter after I moved, I used a free weekend to paint a little cottage. I had this left over house paint and I just parked the Fury out in the sun and painted it.”
She drives her car regularly, turning art theory on its head. With Mona, function follows form. “It’s huge and I use it to take the garbage to the dump. That trunk … you could fit like a family of six in that trunk. I use it to do errands in the summer. I go to the grocery, the garden center. What everybody else does in a car. I don’t use it much in the winter because it doesn’t have a window in the back. I cut the window out. It was plastic and it turned yellow and I couldn’t see through it.”
No matter, the Fury has proven a perfect fit. It provides basic transportation and, more importantly, serves as a moving billboard for Mona’s eclectic and colorful art. “It attracts a lot of attention. People ask me about it. It gives me a chance to tell them about what I do. People say, ‘Ooh, psychedelic.’ Everyone loves it. ‘Can I take my picture by your car?’ One person said to me, ‘That is a classic car. Why did you do that to it?’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ It makes me happy. It’s fun to drive. It’s just fun to have something other people don’t have.”
© 2007 Planet Zeus Media, LLC
