Scott Wade digs dusty roads

By Anita Miller
News Editor

San Marcos August 05, 2006 01:53 pm

— Scott Wade, as the whole wide world is learning, appreciates the beauty of impermanence. But if the San Marcos resident can manage to steer the roller-coaster his life has been of late, he just might find himself with fame and fortune that won’t blow — or wash — away.
As most people in Central Texas are aware, Wade and his unique “dusty car” art were profiled by a humor columnists at the big Metro daily up the road last month. Since then he’s become a darling of Internet bloggers, been invited to appear on a TV talk show, was offered up as a “role model” in a horoscope and been contacted by Ripley’s Believe It or Not (and some heavy hitters he’s not at liberty to disclose).
Wade’s dirty pictures are also featured in the current issue of National Enquirer.
Oh, and he’s continuing to create new art with his fingers and brushes from the thick, clingy caliche dust kicked up on the long dirt road home he and wife Robin Wood negotiate each day.
On Wednesday, Wood’s blue Mazda was sporting a brand-new rendition of “The Girl With a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer. Works Wade plans to undertake soon include Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — “I might change their faces to more contemporary characters,” he avers. “That’s all I’ll say about it.”
Some of his more recognized pieces have included da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and “A Friend in Need” by C.M. Coolidge (more commonly known as dogs playing poker) — all either on the Mazda or Wade’s MINI Cooper.
Google Wade’s name and “dusty” and you get more than 71,000 hits — a good percentage of them leading to the 47-year-old artist, graphic artist and musician whose “parents never let me play in the dirt when I was a little kid.” And since he launched his own Web site (dirtycarart.com) less than two weeks ago, one day’s visitors numbered more than 55,000.
“Who would have guessed that people want to look at dirty pictures on the Internet,” Wade quipped. “It’s crazy.”
Even before he made the daily news and world wide web, the couple learned to figure a few extra minutes into their daily chores to allow for interactions with the curious. “People behind us at stoplights will jump out and take pictures with their cell phones,” says Wood, a librarian at the San Marcos Public Library. “Or people next to us at stoplights will back up to look.”
“People roll up next to me and stop and want to talk about it,” Wade says. Or worse. “One time at HEB a guy pulls up behind me in his pickup, so I can’t get out. He asked me to wait, his daughter had gone in to buy a disposable camera.”
“It’s been a big surprise,” Wood said. “Definitely at first we were just walking around in a daze, who would’ve thunk? All these new people are contacting Scott, every day there’s a new message on our voice mail.”
Wade likens the process of his transitory creations to sand mandalas created and then destroyed by Buddhist monks, to castles in the sand, sculptures made of ice and pumpkins carved into jack o’lanterns.
“It’s just there for a short time for people to enjoy. It’s not meant to be taken too seriously but to be beautiful. Flowers don’t last a long time but we enjoy them while they do,” he said.
And like much art, Wade’s dust drawings are a political statement too, independent of what they depict.
“We really don’t like to wash our cars as often as we need to keep them clean,” he says. “We live over the Edwards Aquifer and we want to preserve it.”
After all, permanence has its place too.

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