STRAIGHT LINE ADAM AMBRO’S NOT-QUITE-PERFECT ART Words MEGAN MICHELSON STANDING in a parking lot at Arapahoe Basin or at a backcountry trailhead in Colorado’s Front Range, Adam Ambro often spots a car he likes. Not a fancy, polished car, but a dirt-crusted Ford pickup truck with a camper top or a vintage camper van with a snowboard mounted on its grille. A car with stories. “It can get a little creepy when I’m taking pictures of other people’s cars,” Ambro says with a laugh. He’s not a creep though, he’s an artist—a talented il-lustrator who finds inspiration for his work from the quirky world of outdoor adventure mobiles. Some people paint na-ture and wilderness; Ambro draws the rigs you’ll drive to get to those wild places. Instead of using blank white canvases, Ambro sketches atop pages ripped from old ski magazines, or on ski resort trail maps or newspaper clippings. “By using these backgrounds, nothing has to be perfect right away,” Ambro says. “With the newspaper or map offering a little noise in the background, I can keep drawing over the top of it. A blank piece of paper is more intimidating.” Ambro, a dedicated skier who lives in Golden, CO, once drew a snowcat from Wolf Creek Ski Area, and the snowcat driver spotted it and bought the print on a T-shirt. Another time, he penned an old Volvo he saw on the road and later found out it was owned by the manager of a nearby ski and bike shop. “It’s really about the character of the car, like an old, weathered, wrinkled personality,” the 48-year-old says. “I consider these automotive portraits more than anything else.” He draws the cars from a head-on perspective (versus the three-quarter view that most car artists use), almost like the face of the car is staring the viewer down. Ambro grew up in Kalamazoo, MI, the son of a father who loved collecting and selling old cars. As a kid, he lived in a three-bedroom house with a five-car garage. He moved to Colorado in 1997 and got into skiing. “We ski, we bike, we do it all,” he says. These days, his family still has a drive-way full of cars: a pickup truck, an old Ford conversion van, an SUV and his teenage daughter’s Toyota truck. But he prefers to draw the vehicles of strangers. “I have yet to draw any of my own cars,” he says. Artwork: Adam Ambro When he started drawing old cars during his free time in grad school, he would sketch onto classified pages from the Denver Post . “When newspapers physically started to go away, I had to scratch my head. What am I going to do? I didn’t have a canvas anymore,” he says. So he picked up free copies of Elevation Outdoors , a Colorado outdoor-sports magazine, and used those instead. “It had a lot of great white space, and it also had relevant articles to what I was drawing,” he says. “I wasn’t afraid of drawing a picture over a picture, so part of it is curating and collaging that canvas before things get started so the color, image and words all work together.” He’s used glossy pages of old Powder and Backcountry magazines and trail maps from his favorite ski areas around Colorado too. The end result is a layered, textured look that is part ski-bum poster, part fine art. His pieces—which come as originals or prints, or printed on T-shirts—range in price from $25 to $1,600. He’s shown his work at the Crested Butte Arts Festival and on the walls of Golden’s breweries. “If you take my art and put a pin through it on the garage wall, you’re not going to offend me,” he says. “That’s what it’s built for. The grit behind it all is what I find beautiful, not the perfection.” 032 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 2: Page 32
