Visual Rhetoric: The First Car of NASCAR

Matthew Haulot

Jen Fleischer

English 1A

21 March 2014

The First Car of NASCAR

Creating an object that makes a message obvious is a hard thing to do. The material that goes into making the object matters greatly. Everything that the object is made out of says something about the meaning or message of the object. It describes it in a certain way and creates a tone for it. The size of the object matters because it gives it meaning, the bigger the object, the bigger the meaning may be. Art doesn’t come easy, it takes time and there are a lot of difficulties to overcome in order to make it just right and in order to make it portray the exact message that the artist wants to get across. The amount of time and effort that goes into a piece of art is never truly known by anyone beside the artist because only they know the true meaning behind it.

            The object that I created was a replica of an old style stock car from the forties. It shows that it is an old style stock car from all the different colors and the shape of the body. To a regular person who is uneducated about the different style of bodies it may be hard to see but the long front nose of the car is only something that was around in the early days of the sport. The different colors of the car show how teams would use anything they could to put a car together. I used the colors to show that it was different pieces put together to create one. The surface that the car sits on is made of really slick, unsteady putty. This putty resembles the unsafe surface that the cars use to race on. Just like the putty is unstable, the cars used to be unstable in the first years of NASCAR. The tone of my sculpture is playful, the colors and the material is what makes it playful. The colors are bright and welcoming while the material has a texture that makes it feel soft and lively. The texture of my object is soft and as a result it is very delicate. It crushes under easy pressure. The material that the car sits on is soft and slick showing unsteadiness. The intended audience for my object is anyone who is interested in racers or cars in general. It would probably catch the eye of a young child because of the colors and the material but an old eye would notice the meanings worked into the art and see past the colors and soft texture. When creating this object I knew it

would be hard to persuade the audience in an emotional way strictly based on the fact that a car cannot always be the most emotional thing.  I had to get my message across by showing logical sense in the way I shaped and built my car. I couldn’t just through something together; it took time and thought to find out what I wanted it to look like because in my mind I had a certain image that I wanted to create once I heard about the assignment. This is the type of object that one would see in a children’s room because of the color once again. It looks like a toy one would buy at Toys R Us, or some store like that. Although it would not be easily understandable by a child, it would not matter because they would look past the meaning and straight to the visual appearance. In a different atmosphere my object may mean something different but it is definitely something that you would see in a child’s room.

            Throughout the process of making my object I came across many different obstacles. The first obstacle that I came across was what my object would be. I thought about doing a checkered flag but I could not think about how I would make that into a symbol. Once I came up with idea to build a car I realized I could make a message out of it. The second challenge was to decide what I wanted to make my object out of. I needed to pick something that would hold up and be able to have a meaning behind it. The first type of material that I tried making my car out of was a sort of putty. When I was making my car for the first time I was hoping that the putty would hold up and stay standing but it only stood for a matter of seconds before it started tumbling down like a piece of ice melting under a flame. After that I knew I could not make a standing object out of the putty and would need something much stronger and more stable. The point was to find a material

that was fragile yet sturdy. When I started my second attempt, this time using play dough, I realized I found the material that I needed all along. It was sturdy, yet not too firm, and it was easily malleable to create anything I wanted.

With all the work I have put into creating my object, both mentally and physically, I believe that I deserve a good grade. A reasonable grade for myself would be a B+ or an A-. I know that my artwork is not the greatest and that it could be better but this is not an art class so the important thing is to see what the meaning of the object is. In my own mind I believe that I did a great job at describing my object and telling the audience what my object means. I created it in a way that looks simple but there are so many features that were created with a specific purpose in mind. For example, the different colors of the car represent how car owners and drivers would take pieces from a bunch of junk cars and create one working car. This is not something that is seen right away, it is something that the viewer will have to look at for a while. This is another reason why I believe I deserve a good grade. I created an object that does not have an obvious meaning. Good art takes time to figure out and that is what I created.

Creating a piece of art that has true meaning behind it is a very large task to accomplish. The audience or viewers do not understand how much work went into creating that object. They do not understand the exact meaning of the art; only the artiest knows the true meaning of the work. Before starting my project I had no idea that the type of material would be important but once I started thinking about it I realized that it really did matter. The material that makes up art is what gives it the meaning that the artist is trying to convey. Art is not an easy thing to create but when the finished project is complete, the outcome is grand and unique because all artwork has its meaning and its own unique style.