These hyperreal drawings of trucks look just like photographs – and take up to 500 hours to make

By Francesca Perry, CNN

(CNN) — Andrew Holmes’ images of trucks on Californian highways are sun-drenched, saturated and sharp. Looking at the crystal clear snapshots, you can almost hear the roar of the engines, feel the heat reflected off shiny aluminum gas tanks, and smell the diesel pumped out of the exhausts. But these are not photographs: each hyperreal image is in fact a color pencil drawing, resulting from between 300 and 500 hours of careful construction. Now, Holmes’ works have been brought together in a book — “Gas Tank City” (Circa Press) — alongside a show of the same name at London’s Architectural Association (AA).

Holmes trained as an architect: he attended the AA, and even worked with the late Richard Rogers in 1969, on designs for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. But Holmes has since made his name as a multimedia artist, who by his own admission has been dedicated to drawing since he was four years old. Having grown up in the English town of Bromsgrove, Holmes traveled to the US as a student, at first snapping photographs and drawing what he saw in New York City, before heading out to Los Angeles and southern California. He became entranced by the Interstate Highway System: “I discovered (it) was designed as a single object,” he explained over coffee in London. “It (was) 43,000 miles long (at the time of its original design in 1956) — the biggest object that’s ever been designed in the world.”

In California, Holmes regularly got in his car and drove along the highways. This was the early 1970s. “In those days, driving was actually a pleasure,” he said, contrasting it to the increased traffic of more recent years. He would visit truck stops and simply observe: the gas stations, the vehicles, the roadside diners and their signs. Something about them reminded him of visiting the local train station as a child in England, and watching “these huge things belching steam” pull into the station. What he loves about trucks is a similar sensory overload: “The sound, the smell, the shiny aluminum, the size of the things.”

The 100 drawings that make up the “Gas Tank City” series seem to celebrate every inch of trucks — particularly classic Kenworth models — from their huge radiator grilles to their “West Coast” side-view mirrors, and from the sweeping curves of their fenders to their constellations of lights.

The drawings are slick with color and detail. In one, a red truck carrying two gleaming gas tanks has stopped at an angle; in the reflection of the mirror-like aluminum, we see the surrounding urban landscape, including buildings across the street and a palm tree reaching into the blue sky in meticulous detail. A red sign on the truck’s side warns of flammability; green and orange tubes are strapped into place along the tanks; and every imperfection on the road or welding mark on the metal is brought into focus.

While out driving, Holmes would snap photographs on his camera of fleeting compositions that caught his eye, and then translate them into painstakingly observed drawings. While the words “hyperreal” and “photorealistic” are used to describe his work, Holmes points out that the drawings are “completely unlike” photographic images.

He remembers being frustrated with the shallow depth of field cameras had in the early 1970s: only one area would be in focus, while the rest of the image would be blurry. “I realised if you took three photographs” — identically framed but changing what was in focus — “you could then construct a drawing where everything is in focus.” Holmes’ drawings display a crisp flatness of vision that we may now be used to with smartphone cameras, but that wasn’t possible to capture on film back then.

Drawing also allowed him to play with light and color. “I used to draw from a 35mm (photographic) slide,” he said. “I’d hold it up against the sun, so you could see into the shadow areas.” He then drew these parts of the image as if they were artificially illuminated, bringing the colors to unreal saturation. The end result is tonally “completely different” from a photograph. When exhibited side by side, he added, the original photograph almost looks grey in comparison to the drawing.

While people aren’t the subject of “Gas Tank City,” they nevertheless infuse the series: Holmes would chat to the drivers of the trucks he drew, striking up conversations on his travels. “When I showed them a drawing, they immediately got excited and we became friends,” he said. Then the drivers helped — suggesting where else Holmes could go to see a particularly good truck stop, or collection of vehicles.

Fifty years after he started, Holmes continues to portray the highway system, its trucks and its culture. Over the decades, camera technology developed: Holmes admits to now using digital photographs as the basis for his drawings, but the works still demand hundreds of hours each. Somehow, the drawings from the early days hardly look different to those made in recent years. Together, “Gas Tank City” creates a portrait of life on the road, detached from specificities of time and place.

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