More 'Cars in Snow'

Here in the UK we have just experienced the coldest winter for ten years according to the newspapers. It certainly has been frosty, with mostly sub zero temperatures reminding me of they type of winters we used to have many years ago.

The paintings in this post show a collection of small 7" x 5" sketches that I did a while back on the subject of old cars in snow. They are mainly done from childhood memories and my intention was to work them up into fully finished paintings sometime later. The painting above shows a 'Standard Ten' model built by the Standard/Triumph factory between 1954-ish to 1959, I don't recall exactly.

In the painting the driver has had to pull over as the temperature gauge has rocketed skywards. This was a common thing in those days and happened as the bottom of the radiator froze and then prevented the proper circulation of the coolant. The cure (and something you never see today) was to blank off part of the grille using Aluminium foil thus reducing the flow of freezing air to the radiator. When walking to school on those cold foggy winter mornings in the early '60's I saw this scene many times.

The car above is the 1953 - 59 Ford Popular, seen in a typical street scene of the 1950's/60's.
I mentioned the popular in an earlier post but it's a car I'll come back to over and over again!

The car featured below is the upmarket Rover 3.5 V-8, not usually a car seen abandoned as this one was, but made for a good sketch.

Finally, here's a shot of four of the six small sketches in this series. Of them all only one was ever made into a fully worked up oil painting, the sketches themselves were sold on ebay for $20.00 each!