Since we’re fast approaching road trip season, or really we’re already in the the beginning stages of it, the work of Bill Frederick is probably just the kick in the ass I need to start traversing the great, black arteries of the U.S. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything but a day trip, and Frederick’s vast ink and watercolor vistas of the open road whet my appetite for the long haul. He depicts, in beautiful realism, the overly beaten paths, the desolate stretches of abandoned blacktop, the soulless fluorescent nerve centers of modern gas stations. He understands that the best part of the road trip is the strange view into places that quiet Americans call home, places that are nothing more than a heartbeat of a stop along the way, which you can never really understand. It’s like peeping in the flickering blue windows of hundreds of suburban houses all in one drawn out continuum. Frederick has perfectly captured the isolation, sadness, and absolute obsession of Americans reliving manifest destiny in a last desperate attempt at understanding the lands and people they call home.
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