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Pedal to the Metal

The Daytona International Speedway hosts the NASCAR Winston Cup Series Race today.

Robert Sarsony, maker of today's "racy" artwork, is a self-taught painter and printmaker who began exhibiting in local shows in New Jersey in 1963. The following year he made his New York debut in a group show at Allied Artists.

In the late 1960s, Sarsony began a series of paintings based on book and magazine illustrations from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Working from silent movie stills, portrayals of historical events, pictures from old children's books, and other ephemera of popular culture which he calls "pop antiques," he transforms anonymous events into statements of individual memory. In The Starter Told Parker to Go Around, Sarsony shows a race car surging forward, large within the canvas. The trompe l'oeil cards seemingly tucked into the edges of the frame at upper left (Diane) and lower center (U.S.S. North Carolina) are personal elements, offering notes of memory, wistfulness, or family association that change the emotional tenor of the scene.

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (exhibition text, National Museum of American Art, 1987).

Pictured: Robert Sarsony, born 1938, The Starter Told Parker to Go Around, 1971, oil on fiberboard, 30 x 40 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation.