Tom Forrestall painted the car over the winter of 2014 using 15 colours of auto paint.
For artist Tom Forrestall, buying a Mercedes-Benz 300 SD in 1980 was his most daunting purchase since he'd acquired a five-apartment building for its studio space, three years out of art college.
"A gigantic amount of money at the time, $43,000, maybe $42,000 and change," Forrestall said. What he couldn't know, though, was that it would turn out to be a steal: the 300 SD has proved to be a most durable Mercedes.
Its motor was derived from the five-cylinder turbo diesel that powered Daimler-Benz's sleek C-111 to multiple speed records in 1978. Tuned for the road, it was nigh indestructible.
Forrestall's was still like new as it rumbled into its fourth decade surpassing 230,000 km and every bit as strong as the artist's will to paint. That year, 2010, the 74-year-old Forrestall flew to Israel and produced 24 watercolours for the Atlantic Jewish Council.
Now the Dartmouth, N.S.-based master of magic realism has assured the 300 SD's perpetuity by painting the car itself. It was on exhibit at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, N.B., recently along with 40 sketches that mapped Forrestall's vision. A national tour is in the planning stages. Some day, he hopes, his car will appear at the Mercedes museum in Stuttgart, Germany.
How this came about has all to do with the difficulty a man can encounter in letting go – and how a woman can put the skids to such reluctance.
"We were trying to get the garage cleared for a variety of reasons," Forrestall's companion, Mary O'Regan, said in a telephone interview, "and the challenge was, his car was in there, on stilts [meaning jack stands, on which the car had wintered every year since its purchase].
"One of my interests is attachment theory," continued the York university professor of child psychology, "so for this particular attachment, a reason had to be found for Tom to realize the car needed to be removed. Mice! I said mice would be nesting in the glove box."
Forrestall nibbled at that cheese, the trap snapped shut. Soon the car not only was removed, Forrestall heard himself saying the time had come to sell: really, he'd not driven it since buying a new E350 wagon in 2011.
The Kijiji ad had no sooner appeared than attachment blossomed anew. He remembered: All those summer drives from Dartmouth to the 200-year-old farm house at Annapolis Royal; how his late wife, Natalie, had convinced him that $43,000 wasn't too much to spend on a car; cold winter mornings when he'd boost the 300 SD's big battery and start the car as it stood on its jack stands for its continuing well-being.
"Then I said, 'Why don't you paint it and keep it as your logo car,'" O'Regan said. "Tom didn't miss a beat, he said, 'I'll paint the seasons.' And thinking of Sir Thomas More, who was known as A Man For All Seasons, I suggested we name it A Car For All Seasons."
Within months, Mercedes-Benz Canada both bought the car and commissioned the work. O'Regan calls it serendipity that she told another artist, Janne Reuss, about Forrestall's project, and Reuss happens to be married to Tim Reuss, president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz Canada. Beyond that, the O'Regan family has been selling cars since 1915, and in 2006 bought the Halifax Mercedes-Benz dealership from which Forrestall had purchased his 300 SD. "Truly, Mary was the key to all this coming together," he said. "If I'd called Mercedes-Benz with the idea, they might have told me to get lost."
He painted the car over the winter of 2014 in the showroom of O'Regan Mercedes-Benz in Halifax, using 15 colours of auto paint supplied by BASF, the German company that provided the car's original silver grey. Customers in for an oil change were invited to add a blade of grass, a snow flake.
Now, as Beaverbrook gallery visitors view the completed work, a snowstorm has blanketed the 300 SD's trunk. Ah, but winter gets short shrift in Forrestall's panorama. A mirror strategically placed overhead by exhibition curator Nick Webb reveals spring giving way to summer on the roof, then blooming on the hood over the trusty diesel, lush green wild flowers and fiddleheads. Autumn's blowing leafs cascade rearward along the doors, back toward winter.
Portraits of Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, as well as Mercedes Jellinek, daughter of the Austrian importer who insisted her name be added, appear among the flora as a tribute to the project's patron. Still, there can be no doubting, wherever the car's touring may take it, the 300 SD's real ownership. It's Tom Forrestall's, has been since 1980 and forever more.
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Instagram
Add us to your circles
Sign up for our weekly newsletter