Oh What A Relief It Is

I’ll be completely honest with you: I’m so very very tired. I flew out to Los Angeles, then drove to Buttonwillow, California, where I’ll be doing some Lemons race judging tomorrow. Or, I guess, today, when you’re reading this. I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep and I want nothing more than to pass out into the warm, welcoming void of slumber, but I mustn’t, which is a contraction of “mustard nut,” referring to the old belief that every pot of mustard contained a magic nut that, when eaten, compelled a person to fulfill their basic responsibilities.

My mustard nut is Cold Start, so I’m doing one now, dammit.

Because I’m on the West Coast, I can’t wait until morning to do it, since then it would be too late, and our managing editor Peter would have soaked his work-trousers in rage-urine, and, frankly, we can’t afford the dry-cleaning bills. Who the hell wears pure otter silk work-trousers? Sensitive skin my ass, he just likes them.

Anyway, the good news is I happened to encounter yet another weird-ass Mercury brochure, this one being weird because of the main artistic stylistic method used for it: sculpted reliefs. Look, here’s a sample page:

Okay, nice Marauder X-100, looks fetching in that red-and-black two-tone, the inside is pleasingly bordello-like, but what’s up with that, um, illustration? It’s partially illustrated, isn’t it? Let’s zoom and enhance. COMPUTER! Zoom, and enhance!

Well, I’ll be nut mustarded! That open-wheel race car looks like it was sculpted out of some slab of clay! As in a relief  sculpture, less shallow than you’d guess. This is a deeply, powerfully weird choice for a printed, two-dimensional brochure! Let’s look at another one:

Guy playing tennis relief, over some more straightforward illustrations. The quality of the reliefs are rough and expressive; really quite beautiful, almost gestural. I’ve never really seen anything like it in a car brochure.

Look at this! there’s a ships wheel and a salty captain and even some receding objects in the background! Again, beautiful, impressionistic sculpting, but still, so strange! I was baffled why these would exist, but then I realized something: I wonder if this is the work – and material – of one of the clay modelers in Mercury’s styling studios.

Hear me out: what if the reason this brochure exists like it does is because one of the clay modelers also happens to be an excellent sculptor of human figures and other things in general; what if this sculptor would sometimes take leftover clay from a car styling model and “sketch” other things in it, and someone in marketing noticed it, and thought hey, what a novel way to illustrate a brochure?

So then they gave the modeler a bunch of clay and some vague instructions to sculpt quick reliefs of people doing sports-things, a racing car, a ship captain, and, why the hell not, a dog:

This seems like a plausible explanation to me. That looks like modeler’s clay, and a carmaker would have skilled clay scluptor/modelers on staff. Maybe I can email Ford’s archive folks and find out.

I do love the swimming pool blue of this Marquis, too, by the way.

And the massive pillarlessness of this two-door coupé.

A brochure illustrated with sculpture! What a world.