Mark Vinci’s Crushed Car Masterpieces
Writer Shannon Severson
In Mark Vinci’s Phoenix studio, crushed car parts — including pieces of a Mini Cooper — transform into sophisticated wall sculptures. It’s a far cry from the pristine automobiles on his Sicilian grandfather’s New Jersey car dealership lot, where his parents would often drop off their rambunctious son for an afternoon of supervision.
Young Mark would spend hours in his grandfather’s car, rolling windows up and down while 1960s pop music from New York City’s WABC-AM filled the air. Though his tendency to doodle during class often got him into trouble at school, these afternoons with Grandpa Tony, who was “entertained to entertain” his artistic grandson, became cherished memories that would influence his creative path for decades to come.
Shifting Gears
Despite his classroom antics, Vinci’s artistic talent couldn’t be ignored. His second grade teacher recognized his potential and entered him in an archdiocesewide art contest, where he won first place.
“It was a scene of the western U.S., though I’d never been,” Vinci recalls. “A landscape, kind of minimal with cirrus clouds. My only references at the time were National Geographic, ‘Bonanza’ and Disney. I’d love to see it again. My parents recognized my talent. I took some courses in art, but I was a lazy kid. If it was an assignment, I wasn’t interested.”
He was always most interested in comic illustration, but when he reflects on his life, cars — especially unusual ones — have always been a touchpoint. His high school art teacher, Harry Minzer, took note of Vinci’s very first assignment — a black-and-white drawing of a motorcycle. Minzer became a mentor and prompted Vinci to pursue art in college.
After earning a fine arts degree in design from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, Vinci launched a career in advertising in Atlanta, where his parents had relocated.
His first boss headed a small but dynamic three-person Atlanta advertising agency — creating groundbreaking campaigns for clients like FedEx and Daniel Construction. Vinci’s work there earned him his first industry award.
Then, he met Peter Hudson, the art director of Atlanta magazine, who would become both a close friend and transformative mentor, challenging Vinci’s artistic conventions and expanding his creative horizons.
“It was one of the cooler offices I’d ever been in,” Vinci recalls, his voice still animated by the memory. “He had all this artwork on his walls. It was by people who weren’t necessarily mainstream illustrators. They were innovators — Brad Holland, Marshall Arisman. He didn’t hire people doing photorealistic imagery. He wanted more painterly artists. He’d call them and say, ‘I have an article; do whatever you want for it.’ They had freedom. Peter won awards for this approach.”
Hudson was also a motorcycle enthusiast, but his taste ran to European performance racing brands like Ducati, Moto Guzzi and Vincent Black Shadow — a far cry from the Harleys, Triumphs and Hondas that Vinci knew. The two bonded over their shared passion for motorcycles and cars, with Hudson eventually selling Vinci his first Citroen.
“He broke my New Jersey provincialism,” Vinci muses. “He didn’t dismiss it, but he opened all these windows. He was very much about the creative process. When he asked to see my portfolio, he said, ‘Your life must suck. You’re creative. You have skills beyond just pasting stuff down.’ That was a big deal for me, especially as a 21-year-old.”
In the ensuing years, Vinci continued to explore different views of illustration, including offbeat European comics, and pushed himself creatively by attending the School of Visual Arts in New York City under Arisman to hone his life-drawing skills. He’d met his now-wife, Cat, in Atlanta — an opposites-attract love story. He admired her calm nature, extensive travel experience and deep knowledge of fine art, printmaking and photography.
“She’s chill and I’m not,” he says with a laugh. “She’s white bread and I’m not. She knew everything about fine art. I [met her and] thought — not only is she cute, she knows everything!”
The couple alternated between New York City and Atlanta, building impressive careers — Vinci at CBS and CNN, Cat at CNN and MTV. During this time, Vinci found himself at the forefront of the analog-to-digital revolution, creating sports graphics under Don Sperling, the legendary founder of NBA Entertainment.
Desert Acceleration
The Vincis’ journey eventually led them to Phoenix in the mid-1980s, a landscape that had already captured Mark’s artistic imagination during earlier visits. The move proved fortuitous — he soon won three consecutive Emmy Awards for broadcast graphics at KTVK-TV, then an ABC affiliate, while immersing himself fully in the Southwestern environment he had long admired.
Today, the couple occupies a light-filled Ralph Haver-designed home where they both create and display their art. They have lived in Phoenix for 30 years this time around. It’s a long way from that car lot in Newark, New Jersey, but some things never change. Vinci remains affable, energetic, quick-witted and bold, full of stories and ideas. With more than 40 years of creative accomplishment under his belt, he continues drawing, painting, designing and experimenting with his talents.
In 2001, Vinci’s career reached a significant milestone when he was awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant for his vivid abstractionist landscapes, which drew influence from fellow New York artists Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. The triumph was short-lived — he received the grant just five days before Sept. 11, when the art world ground to a halt.
This market disruption added new challenges to an already transitional period in Vinci’s life. After leaving television graphics in 1998, he embraced various occupations, including working as a chauffeur for Blue Star Transportation. His passengers ranged from politicians attending the annual McCain Sedona Forum to celebrities like Michael Jordan and Michael Eisner. He also drove trucks, worked construction and took on other jobs that kept him moving while he continued to develop his artistic vision.
“I was already painting the driving environment,” Vinci reflects, “but I knew there was something more radical waiting to emerge.”
That radical transformation arrived during a routine drive, setting the stage for Vinci’s most innovative work yet.
Crash Course in Creativity
One day, while driving with Cat and their son, Vincent, Vinci noticed a spot in the road that had been overstriped. The sight triggered a memory of Tom Sachs’ art exhibition — a slot car track arranged in a huge New York City gallery, complete with replicas of iconic buildings and the grid of famous streets and avenues. Only the cars and tracks were in color; the rest was crafted in white foam core.
“I thought to myself — what if I got a car and smashed it into things?” he recalls. “What if I put a car piece on the wall and scraped it back and forth? What if I start to use the materials that I see while I drive to make the artwork — like billboard paper and striping material?”
He began mapping out ideas and tracked down the road-striping company, United Rentals. He approached them about spraying items he would bring on days when they serviced their sprayer trucks.
“I got a call some weeks later,” he recalls. “They said to come Saturday at 7 a.m. I stood out there and we sprayed all this stuff. I had ideas — I started asking how the sprayers worked — how wide could they spray and could they splatter?”
The crew, accustomed to driving in straight lines, found themselves caught up in Vinci’s creative enthusiasm. One of those experimental pieces now hangs in United Rentals’ Connecticut headquarters.
“During this same period, I began collage work using discarded billboard paper,” he explains. “I’d use an X-Acto knife to cut them into thousands of pieces and rearrange them to mimic motion blur and interpret the color streaks.”
The ideas flowed like cars on a fast-moving highway.
Inspired by abstract expressionist John Chamberlain, known for crushing car parts into massive, freestanding sculptures, Vinci began his own exploration of automotive materials. He assembled a network of collaborators: auto body shops for wrecked car parts, a friend who owned a paving company and another who built hot rods with access to grinding and welding equipment.
“I’d ask for the most smashed-up car parts, then have them acid-washed,” he says. “I set an appointment with the paving company at a site where they were putting in a new Taco Bell in the West Valley. I brought the parts and had the guy run them over, then I’d stack them and have him run over them again and again. He said, ‘This is the best!’
“I brought the pieces back to my studio, cut them into chunks with a grinder cutting blade and started moving items around intuitively, taking pictures of my progress. When the composition felt right, I’d weld them together at my friend’s hot rod shop and have them powder coated.”
Full Throttle Forward
The resulting works, which have caught the attention of serious collectors throughout the Southwest, are masterfully executed and deliberately open to interpretation. Each piece, ranging from intimate wall sculptures to dramatic large-scale installations, pulses with dynamic energy, inviting viewers to discover their own narratives within the transformed automotive elements.
Vinci continues to explore the crushed car parts series — now highly sought after by both automotive enthusiasts and fine art collectors — while simultaneously returning to more traditional, intuitive forms of painting, reawakening techniques that had lain dormant for years.
“Yes, it’s a satisfying process, but at the same time, there’s an area of creativity that I feel like I’ve let go,” he shares. “That is the more traditional form of painting. I want to bring that back as something I continue to explore. Now I mix abstraction with illustration, always working to capture movement in the pieces.”
Vinci’s current paintings on canvas, which often feature iconic cars such as Ferraris and Porsches alongside abstracted cityscapes, strike a delicate balance between meticulous technique and spontaneous inspiration. His dynamic brushstrokes and elastic use of color capture the essence of movement itself.
Today, Vinci’s artistic journey has come full circle. From those childhood afternoons in his grandfather’s dealership to his current studio where crushed metal transforms into sophisticated wall sculptures, he continues to push the boundaries between automotive culture and fine art. His work stands as a testament to the endless possibilities that emerge when industrial materials meet creative vision — a perfect embodiment of Arizona’s innovative spirit.
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