How each artist's ideas are expressed in their own cars

Thanks to their different personalities, most artists feel free to alter their respective vehicles, reflecting their individual ideas. Above, a Mercedes Pens being exhibited in the 2009 Art Car Festival in San Francisco, California. It's a 1981 Mercedes-Benz 100SD artistically modified by Pen Guy, pseudonym of Costas Schuler, a Greek-American artist, whose exterior is decorated with thousands of recycled pens

Photo: The Brocken Inglory – 2009

In a world where the freedom of expression is an essential element in each one's lives, artists can express their own characteristics by modifying old and even new vehicles – the so-called art cars. Aside from automobiles, vans, buses, and trucks, generally used, may get into considerable transformations that reflect the artists' personal preferences. Several used vehicles, although being new, need to be altered not only in their exterior, but also inside them, to be more attractive.

To make art cars, the exterior is often radically changed, being decorated, painted, or even sculpted as an animal or a monster, for example. However, artists usually configurate the inside of their cars by changing several items, such as back and front seats, and decorating the panels, besides the installation of new equipment and/or engines.

Many artists, thanks to their different personalities, have freedom to modify their respective vehicles and express their own ideas in these wonders of the urban landscape. For example, people can transform a Volkswagen Bug into any insect, such as a cockroach, a beetle, a fly, etc., and they also can change the shape of a van like a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, making it a horse or a camel. Besides, artists who work on their art cars also can express their individual thoughts, virtues, and values in public.

One of the positive ideas frequently spread in art cars is the freedom of traveling from a place to another temporarily, that leads to experience a nomadic life. And another common characteristic, easily found in women's artistically modified cars, is the vanity, because the fact that most women believe to be too proud of their own beauty, love, intelligence, happiness, and other good qualities that probably make them vainer than men.

While some people think art cars have a strange appearance, those who appreciate them think they're beautiful and very attractive for streets and avenues. There are different models of art vehicles that can sound eccentric, like certain kinds of animals and things. However, people who enjoy art cars believe these walker creatures are magnificent artworks walking in cities and towns all over the world.