Route 66 , Arizona

Route 66 , Arizona Some roads are just roads. Route 66 is a myth with asphalt underneath it. I wanted a subject that let me paint distance, mythology, and Americana all at once, a road that isn't really about the road, but about everything people project onto it: freedom, escape, reinvention, the open West. Painting a highway disappearing into red rock felt like painting a sentence with no full stop. Route 66 was commissioned in 1926, running Chicago to Santa Monica over 2,400 miles. The Arizona stretch, through towns like Kingman, Seligman, Winslow and Holbrook, cut straight through some of the most dramatic desert scenery in the country. It carried Dust Bowl migrants west in the '30s, then postwar road-trippers with motor courts, diners and neon signs in the '50s and '60s. When I-40 bypassed it in the '80s, Route 66 was decertified officially erased from the map in 1985. Arizona is actually where its revival began: Seligman's Angel Delgadillo led the push to have it preserved as a "Historic Route," and that's the sign that appears in this piece the small marker doing a lot of quiet narrative work. I'm not American, and I think that's exactly why this series exists. I'm not painting nostalgia I lived through I'm painting America the way it arrives to an outsider: as image, as myth, as postcard and pop culture distilled into shape and color before it's ever distilled into memory. Route 66 is maybe the purest version of that it's already semi-fictional even to Americans, a symbol as much as a road. Painting it as an outsider isn't a limitation here, it's the whole point of the series: American Landscape is about the idea of America as seen from outside it.