Thursday, July 31, 2014

Route 66 And The Summer of '26

Posted by Gina Higgins American-Noir at Thursday, July 31, 2014

As a neo-noir artist who aims to steer clear of hackneyed cliches in my paintings, I am always on the lookout for the more obscure sources of “noir” inspiration and sometimes find just what I’m looking for in the most unlikely of places.

Having spent lengthy periods of time in the southwest I am naturally drawn to the solitary beauty of this part of the country. From the unforgiving Mojave Desert summer to Utah’s Zion National Park to the Painted Desert in Flagstaff, I find these desert highways lush with artistic possibilities. There’s just something hypnotic about the sound of the wind that blows through deserted ghost towns, the hallucinatory pull of an abandoned stretch of highway, and those moments just before sundown when the road and the horizon meld into an orange liquid sky that creates the perfect backdrop for a noir mystery. 




As with most things I serendipitously stumble upon, I recently discovered The Autry National Center of the American West, located at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, is currently doing a major retrospective on historic Route 66.

Autry National Center of the American West
4700 Western Heritage Way
Los Angeles, CA 90027-1462

“ROUTE 66 THE ROAD AND THE ROMANCE” runs now through January 2015. With a huge collection of memorabilia the exhibit includes a typewritten scroll of Kerouac’s “On The Road,” an original Jackson Pollock landscape, the oldest existing Route 66 shield, and one of Steinbeck’s handwritten pages from “The Grapes of Wrath,” amongst hundreds of other artifacts chronicling the history of this iconic 2400 mile highway that crosses 8 states and connects the part of Los Angeles we now call Santa Monica Boulevard to Chicago.

                                        Jack Kerouac "On The Road" - 1951



There are dozens of songs written specifically about Route 66, but I was unable to locate too many references in film. The 1945 noir thriller “Detour” and the cult classic “Bagdad Café” come to mind, as does David Lynch’s “Wild At Heart” and “Lost Highway.” “Grapes of Wrath” “Easy Rider” and “Rain Man” all incorporate bits of Route 66 but are hardly noir in genre…


Filmmakers, there are over 2000 tenebrous miles of material waiting for you out there…Until then, I’m back to sketching the words and images I found en route and hoping to recreate them on canvas.

As a bit of trivia, Oklahoma has more miles of the original Route 66 than any other state, with Arizona containing the longest stretch of highway still in existence today.




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