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Art on the Road

Pick a street, any street, in Panama City or Port-au-Prince and you'll probably see them. You'll find them in Medellin, Colombia, as well, but there you must visit the outskirts of town or the market area. "They" are the wonderfully decorated buses and trucks which are the privately-owned public transportation of these cities. Ride a tap-tap, chiva or bus and you're in for an aesthetic treat. You'll travel down the street in a marvellous mix of art and words, accompanied by flashing lights and pulsating music.

Each of these vehicles began life as a solid colour truck or bus accented with chrome. Each has now been rebuilt for its new role in life and decorated to suit the current fashion. Students of popular culture agree that the paintings and words decorating these vehicles offer an insight into widely shared attitudes and beliefs, into the "soul", perhaps, of Panama, Haiti and Colombia.

The art of decorating these painted trucks and buses basically started after the Second World War, although there may be older examples of it. Chivas, tap-taps and buses quickly won an important place in the local economies and affections. Every so often other types of buses or trucks are brought in to replace the painted vehicles, but these interlopers will never obscure the place which chivas, tap-taps and buses have already earned in the literature and art of their respective countries.

In Panama, yellow school buses built in the United States are the raw material. The original colour is quickly hidden under layers of sprayed or airbrushed paint. Along the sides of the bus, beneath the windows, very long images are shown. A speeding semi-trailer truck, a mermaid in her undersea home, a view of mountains with a distant castle, or even the turning, writhing form of a dragon are among the images painted here.

Bus art

The rear emergency door is regarded as the most important spot for bus art, a focal point where an artist concentrates his best work, probably because the rear door is seen the most easily and for the longest time as the bus passes. Artists sign these back door paintings with name or nickname, sometimes with "Painted by ..." and, occasionally, with a telephone number so that other customers may locate them.

The subject for a back door bus painting can be religious or secular, but it is almost never political. Artists become adept in certain categories. Those bus owners who want Christ, the Virgin Mary, or various saints painted know which artists to choose, as do those who prefer comic strip superheroes like Mexico's Kaliman, commercial cartoon characters like the Playboy Bunny, or television actors. A star's popularity could well be rated by his appearance or disappearance from bus art. Hollywood's "Mr. T" in his gold chains and Don Johnson, the $IMiami Vice$N cop, may well be painted over now that their programmes no longer appear on prime time television.

Jesus Teodoro de Villarue, or "Yo To" as he is affectionately known, is regarded as one of the old masters of Panamanian bus art. Yo Yo taught his sons and other apprentices how to paint, but he felt that there were other bus artists who needed his guidance as well. So Yo Yo created for posterity a series of lessons in rear door painting. Carefully numbered and titled "Arte Popular", Yo Yo's lessons can be seen on the rear doors and windows of twenty Panamanian buses.

Ferocious lions, fierce eagles and even cigar-smoking dogs are portrayed on the back doors of buses and trucks. Two painters, one in Panama and the other in Colombia, were inspired by the same advertising calendar printed by the Brown and Bigelow Company, a North American advertising specialties firm. For many years Brown and Bigelow calendars have featured a series of dog paintings originally created by a New York artist named Cassius Marcellus Coolidge who died in 1934. Often shown smoking fat cigars (Coolidge had earlier painted cigar box lids), these bulldogs, collies and Great Danes played cards, billiards and baseball, and went to the races.

While Panamanian bus art reflects the changing urban popular culture of television, movies and music, the subjects for Colombian chiva painters focus more often on rural life. Chivas are rebuilt trucks, converted to carry both passengers and agricultural products from Colombian villages to markets in larger cities such as Medellin, Cali or Cartagena. Both the names for these trucks and the styles of decoration vary from one colombian province to another. Many observers feel that the camion de escalera or ladder truck of Antioquia province is the most beautiful of all.

Cows and coffee

To rebuild a large Ford or General Motors truck, workers remove the entire cargo area, replacing it with a partially enclosed structure. The interior is arranged with rows of removable seats which can be entered from the outside at every row. This arrangement was copied from old trolley cars which also had numerous side entrances. If the chiva's load is large, two cows, for example, or multiple sacks of coffee, it is easy to remove most, if not all, of the seats.

# posted by Medical Information : 2:37 AM