Untitled (Convertible)

A psychedelic car zips across the twisting roads of Peter Saul’s Untitled (Convertible). Emerging from the white ground are a handful of cartoonish trees and a single figure whose expression seems to mirror the hallucinatory world in which he has found himself. Executed circa 1966, just after Saul moved back to Northern California from living in Europe, Untitled (Convertible) is part of a series of works which reflect upon the suburban lifestyle of the artist’s new home in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco, then the epicentre of the hippie movement. Indeed, Untitled (Convertible) is suffused with a countercultural aesthetic befitting his new home. For Saul, the role of drawing in his practice has shifted over the decades; of the drawings created during the 1960s, however, he has always considered each to be like a ‘small painting’, explaining that ‘I just viewed it as a smaller picture. I tried to make it as complete as I could’ (P. Saul, interviewed by J. Olch Richards, Brooklyn, 3-4 November 2009, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).