Over the weekend I completed the second painting in my series of Harley-Davidson images. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, this painting is of the Captain America custom Harley chopper that became an American icon in the 1969 film "Easy Rider".
Again, I love this painting. I'm having a blast painting chrome these days. The colors can be a bit random and the lines rather abstract because it's just one warped reflection after another. Look closely and you can make out what's being reflected. A blue sky. A desert highway. Other parts of the bike. Look closely at the air filter cover and you can see reflections of the bike's "ape hanger" handle bars, the massive exhaust and the extra large sissy bar - all things that made this bike the icon it is. Below is a close up of a painting I did over a decade ago of a Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl victory including an image of Emmitt Smith holding the highly reflective trophy. Same scenario. The object has no color of its own, just reflections.
When you start doing research on this bike and the film, some interesting stories come up. Peter Fonda produced the film himself and actually customized the bikes with some help from some friends. They trolled the police auctions and came across the bikes they would use as the basis for customizing. The Captain America bike was a '52 Harley-Davidson Hydra-Glide. The engines on these old Harleys were called panheads because the cylinder head covers were shaped like pie pans. The only modifications Fonda made were extending the front forks, adding the ape hangers, customizing the exhaust, adding the sissy bar and replacing the gas tank with the now famous stars and stripes peanut tank. Everything else was supposedly stock. As the story goes, they build four bikes - two Captain America bikes and two Billy bikes. One of the Captain America bikes was wrecked in the final scene of the movie and the other was going to be a memento for Fonda. Two months before the film was released, someone broke into the storage facility where the bikes were being kept and stole the three bikes that hadn't been wrecked. The movie hadn't even come out yet, so the thieves didn't know what they were stealing. It's safe to assume that the bikes were parted out and scattered to the wind. Fonda gave the last bike (the mangled wreckage) to Dan Haggerty (you may remember him as Grizzly Adams) as a gift for helping with the production and the customizing of the bikes in the first place. That bike has since been restored and was sold at auction in 1996. You can safely assume that any Captain America bike you see on the road (or even in the Motorcycle Hall of Fame) is just a faithful reproduction of the original, not unlike the many Shelby Cobras you see darting around on weekends.
I did try something new this time around. I've started experimenting with time lapse to show the progression of the piece. It's a little rough, but I think it's intriguing to watch. The music is courtesy of East of Western. I knew these guys when I lived in California and I feel the particular song is a nod to Dick Dale and the classic surfer rock. It seemed to fit.
I'll be starting on the next Harley this afternoon. I'm still thinking about what would be best to work on while on location at the Parade of Homes this Saturday in McKinney. These 30"x40" canvases are a little hard to set up and paint on out in the field, so I'll probably just pick something fun in a smaller format.
I'll keep you posted.
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