The Portrait-Mobile

There is a car dealer from my hometown who loves himself very much. He can't put his name or face in too many places. He has billboards all over town with his mug plastered for all to see and even put two near-life-sized pictures of himself on all his trucks. (Those readers from Massachusetts know exactly who I'm talking about, but I refuse to name him because I don't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing his name on another website.) Anyway, these trucks with his pictures on them are extremely creepy. In one picture, it looks as though he is standing in the back doorway of the vehicle with an armful of boxes, a goofy grin on his face and a pair of creepy eyes that seem to follow you around the room, like a painting in a scary movie. The other is on the side and has him leaning out a driver's side window, as if he was driving the van from the middle, which is just as unnerving to have staring at you as the one in back. I really don't like being around any of these trucks in traffic. Still, as I learned this weekend, as bad as those vehicles are, they could actually be worse.

Driving down to the Cape on Friday I hit one small patch of traffic. This gave me enough time to check out some of the cars around me. One of them was a small van advertising an artist. The side of the vehicle said his specialty was portraits and his van was covered by a giant decal showing off many of his works. This guy clearly has made some money doing this because a decal this size could not have come cheaply. I thought it was a little tacky, but who am I to say what makes for good taste? The bad part didn't arrive until I was able to pull up to the driver's door. That was when I realised the portrait on the driver's door just below the window was of the artist, who was also driving the van. It's very strange to see someone behind the wheel of a vehicle... and then see a picture of that same person two feet lower. I don't think even the most narcissistic person in the world would think this is a good idea.

Here's the even stranger part: the portrait wasn't very good. Now, since I'm a terrible artist this guy's work was better than anything I would ever paint, but if you were planning to have a self-portrait right underneath you as you drive down the highway for all to see, wouldn't you want that self-portrait to be the best thing you've ever painted? I mean, it's the clearest indicator of your skills. If you can't paint a good picture of yourself then why would someone expect you to paint a good picture of them? Just for the sake of comparison I would think you'd put a little extra effort into that one.

I looked at the guy and back at the painting and it was close enough that I could tell it was supposed to be the same person, but it wasn't that great. Certainly not good enough that I would have suspected this artist could make a living painting portraits of other people. If I could have gotten his attention I definitely would have advised him to work on it a little more before we went and stuck on the side of his main form of transportation. Or if he didn't think he could make the painting any better at least move it to a different spot on the van. At least that way people aren't weirded out and disappointed at the same time.