Art movement: The hood ornament lives.

Once, the world's streets and roads were art galleries where every automobile's hood was a display stand for an expressive sculpture--a hood ornament, or mascot, to use the preferred term. Like figureheads on sailing ships, lithe animals, graceful birds, mythic heroes, Indian chiefs, rocket ships, airplanes and countless naked ladies adorned the prows of motor cars. They were created by superb artists and designers, including artist-in-glass Rene Lalique and Rembrandt Bugatti, the foremost animal sculptor of his time and brother of automotive genius Ettore Bugatti. Today, mascots are collectors items, and a handful of craftsmen and artists are still at work creating or recreating them.

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Don Sommer sculpts superb renditions of classic mascot designs--Stutz, Duesenberg, Packard, to name a few. His are acknowledged to surpass the originals in quality, and are most often displayed as sculptures. Sommer mascots are the coveted prizes of the Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance, one of America's premier gatherings of classic autos, which he helped found. A former engineer, Sommer began crafting parts for a 1930 Packard he was restoring. Soon he was creating parts for others, and the rest is history--or an improvement on it.

You could say that Jud Turner's hood art is evolutionary. An accomplished sculptor, Turner also crafts a special collection for mounting on cars and Peterbilt trucks. His large metal sculptures of dinosaurs, lizards, trilobites, manta rays and dragonflies look like they just happened to land on the hood of that Toyota. "One of my goals as a sculptor is to expose people to my art in ways that grab their attention. One way is by putting art where people least expect to see it--in the middle of traffic."

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SOURCES:

Don Sommer, http://www.donsommer.com/dsfa/index.html

Jud Turner, http://www.judturner.com/hood_gal/info.html