This collection of prints is the result of working up various ideas for artwork for the 2020 album, Road Trip (Fall of the Rebel Angels) by the band Ten Million Aliens.
The original working title of the album was American Rust with each track taking a pointed look at a particular facet of modern American culture and one of the early ideas involved taking images of old junkyard American cars and placing them in different empty or desert landscapes.
While looking for different backgrounds, I came across the astonishing painting “Fall of the Rebel Angels” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Bruegel’s 1574 painting is his depiction of “a war in heaven” from the Book of Revelations 12: 7-10 where Satan and a group of rebel angels
are cast down from Heaven to Earth. The classic good versus evil story (think Star Wars but with no technology and CGI). The metaphor was too good to miss and so the album was subsequently retitled “Road trip (Fall of the Rebel Angels)”.
The ideas galvanized into what you see now of a series of old abandoned cars set in medieval and some later classical landscape paintings. It’s painstaking work in Photoshop masking out and recolouring different photographs and internet images but the hardest thing was to get a good match in perspective between a 1950’s junkyard car and a 16th century landscape! (Who knew?)
The prints here are 10 of the best ideas of around 20 or so that I started work on but in the end I would return to the Bruegel and eventually settled for the 1952 Buick Roadmaster in a complex collage of different elements of the painting.
The cars were chosen for a variety of reasons but the Buick was the closest I could find to looking like a classic 1950’s B movie alien. Huge bug eyes and big teeth! Most of these car companies no longer exist or were amalgamated into the big car conglomerates like General Motors in the 70s but for a while these cars epitomised the dreams of a confident and optimistic post war society.
Not for them, a meaningless anodyne name or dull number. They revelled in their new aspirational identities. Stingray, Impala, Barracuda, Eldorado, Airflyte, Thunderbird, Riviera, Challenger, and the Continental.
Dodge brought out their Daytona in 1969 with the specific aim of winning the famous Daytona 500 race. It was the first production car with a rear aero wing (sadly lost on mine) and with its 7 litre firepower Hemi V8 engine it was capable of over 200mph straight
out of the showroom. (Not surprisingly it won the race first time out.) We will never see their likes again.
This collection of prints is the result of working up various ideas for artwork for the 2020 album, Road Trip (Fall of the Rebel Angels) by the band Ten Million Aliens.
The original working title of the album was American Rust with each track taking a pointed look at a particular facet of modern American culture and one of the early ideas involved taking images of old junkyard American cars and placing them in different empty or desert landscapes.
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American Rust 