Dream Machines
From The Times: The Acadian's Weekly Newspaper, May 2005
Patricia Gannon
She’s grown used to gallery goers approaching her husband as the artist behind the oil-painted canvasses of sensuous pipes, chrome and car hoods, motorcycles, mannequins and Ferrari steering wheels. Her collections of smaller work celebrate silvery hubcaps and hood ornaments, gas caps and sporty gearshifts and the occasional ignition with keys or rearview mirror, all unified by Lockwood’s luxurious use of color and languid reflections. Characterized by curves that betray femininity she can’t entirely hide, her abstract-realistic paintings transfix men and enervate women, revving the public with a psychological message of power, danger and more than a little underlying eroticism.
Take Cool Pipes for instance, an undulation of warm orange and cool blue chrome, or the tans and violets of Partly Cloudy at Daytona. Porsche & Palms and Reflections of a Biker Chick need no explanation, particularly to the testosterone crowd.
Slick and technically polished on the surface, there’s a lot more under the artistic hood then most realize.
“They (the vehicles) are about passions and dreams,” says the New Orleans-based artist. “What I’m trying to depict is desire. People want things — it’s what motivates us to do things in life. There’s a real philosophical basis for the paintings.”
The cars and motorcycles also represent a long road trip for Lockwood herself, one that began with an art degree from Tulane and a master’s from Vermont College, with a side trip to the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts.
“I knew flowered still life wasn’t for me,” recalls Lockwood. “But I enjoyed painting the reflections in the cups and bowls. One day, I was in a photography class and took a picture of a tree, then turned around and saw the tree distorted in the chrome of a car. I took the photo back to school and everyone went nuts.”
Lockwood, who recently displayed her work at Galerie Lafayette, quickly fell in love with the chrome and reflections of New Orleans cars, but they weren’t always easy to locate. She decided to take her camera to the Harley-Davidson shop.
“I thought they were beautiful,” she says. “Choppers are rolling sculptures, even their builders see themselves as artists.”
While heavily influenced by the photo-realism of Tom Blackwell, Audrey Flack and New Orleanian Adrian Deckbar, the demise of a difficult marriage is reflected in the chrome of her cars. Works like Bikes and Babes and those featuring mannequins pose political questions of gender and passivity, while admittedly serving as vehicles for the artist’s own angst.
Lockwood’s painting process begins with finding the image, something that’s often easier said than done.
“You have to go to Bike Week, set up photo shoots and take lots and lots of pictures,” she explains. “I love the framing and shooting, and now I’ve gone digital, so I can take hundreds more.”
Once she finds the images she wants, Lockwood does an image crop —a step that renders the image abstract — then projects it onto canvas. Lockwood defends her use of machinery to paint machinery, saying that while she could draw into the painting, she chooses not to.
“I find the camera’s line more ‘feeling,’” she says.
“Then, it’s about layer after layer of painting with oil. It’s time consuming, and there’s no way to do it faster. I listen to lots of books on tape,” she laughs.
The wire wheel on a car takes two weeks to paint. Lockwood calls her use of oil paint and turpentine traditional, and she eschews new mediums, preferring to paint her cars to last.
And while her nearly all-male clientele may see their need for speed and desires reflected in Lockwood’s fantasy chrome, her passion is for the painting and what her power objects reflect about others, both men and women. Photo-realism aside, it’s often not about reality at all, she says, but the spectacle. Any erotic sensation is purely incidental, she maintains.
“It’s just the way the paint comes out,” she smiles. “Me? I just want to get in the car and have it work in the morning.”
