Name/Title
169, The Fab Four, The BeatleTags
***Description
painted- 1st - 2022---- Meet The Beatle! Born in Germany in 1969, (the same year that the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” album was released) this Volkswagen's life ambition was to come to Houston, Texas and become an Art Car. In 2022, with a little help from its friends, The Fab Four (students from three different local high schools who met through Girl Scouting), that dream came true, and today The Beatle gets more smiles to the gallon than ever before. Learn more at TheBeatle.info. Beep beep'm beep beep yeah!---- Hello, hello!
I got involved in the Houston Art Car parade in the early '90s as a volunteer at the parade and the ball, and enjoyed the annual event as a spectator for a few years after that, but finally, in 2008, I decided to design and build my first art car as a tribute to my alma mater and employer, Rice University. The car featured a model of an actual working *single-molecule* car developed by Rice researchers (a "NanoCar" with rotating buckyball wheels and an engine which ran on light and emitted no exhaust). The researchers who discovered how to create and mass produce these cars did so as part of their effort to learn to build machines one molecule at a time so that someday they'll be able to use them to attack diseases the way they grow, one cell at a time. When I had the idea for the car, I told the Orange Show that, provided they did not charge me a separate entry fee for each one (!), I could guarantee that the 21st annual Houston Art Car Parade would be the largest one in history, because on the dashboard of the rolling parade entry ("Unconventional Wisdom - the Rice University NanoCar") was a tiny vial containing ONE BILLION BILLION actual, working molecule-sized art cars. I was very surprised and honored to later learn that this entry won the 2008 Annie Burkes Visionary Artist Award (I was rushing to finish the parade entry and didn't read the parade packet closely--didn't realize there was a Sunday award ceremony!) Two more Rice University themed art cars followed in 2009 and 2012. Then, in 2022, for the triumphant return of the Houston Art Car Parade after two years of COVID quarantine, I got to do my (fab) fourth art car, based on an idea I'd been trying to realize for six years using a 1969 Volkswagen Beetle which needed a LOT of work (I bought the car for a dollar...you get what you pay for!)
With a little help from my friends (especially "The Fab Four," a quartet of local high school students from the Girl Scout troop for which I'm a co-leader), after six years of working to get the car running, and 40 days and 40 Hard Days' Nights of hand-painting the car with artwork from The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" movie, the vision for The Beatle was realized--a labor of love and an ongoing effort to inspire an appreciation of art and music with kids of all ages while maximizing smiles to the gallon. Beep beep'm beep beep yeah!