Streetcar Art

This is the sketch of Dennis Procopio’s streetcar, entitled “Hands Across the Water.”

Here’s some of what Procopio has to say about his design:

Looking at the stark white model streetcar, which is about 6′ long, I thought immediately of a casket. Somewhere in my mind I decided I’d incorporate a face and the insinuation of a body on the top along with the hands, perhaps to allude to a wake. But I left that idea open.

The next idea was that I would cover the windows and doors with plywood. As I already work on plywood this wasn’t hard to come up with. I realized that this would officially begin to make the piece a hurricane Katrina statement, so I decided that somewhere I would include the spray-painted “X” that we all came home to discover on all of our homes. This governmental graffiti is one of the more poignant symbols now associated with this disaster, as it tells who searched the house and the date of the search, the number of dead bodies, the number of dead animals, and any other information such as “dog seen under house.” In fact, plywood, garage doors, brick walls, discarded refrigerators . . . these all became community bulletins boards for the survivors. . . .

I decided that to cover ALL of the pieces of plywood with text and search-party X’s would be too much. I opted instead to do portraits. No one in particular, just faces of people you might see here. This would insinuate people sitting as passengers in the car, only there would be something slightly creepy about having them painted on wood to represent would-be passengers. Then the idea of Fayum Portraits popped into my head. In Egypt, signifying Greco-Roman influence, Fayum portraits were the faces of the deceased painted onto wooden panels which would be affixed to the sarcophagi. . . .

I then had the idea to have a water-line. One of the other creepy things about the neighborhoods we gutted houses in were the water-lines. These were mud-colored racing stripes running horizontally across the faces of all the houses showing where the water level had been. There were usually at least three distinct lines. . . one at or above the door jamb, one just under it and one just under that. For design reasons I decided to make actually water rather than the line where the water would have been. This solved a problem about color. Anything below this line would be a sort of aqua green, above it a darkish blue.

Go read more about Procopio’s sketch at his website here.

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