Art

Driven to Draw

Guy Cassaday's winding road to art

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For Guy Cassaday, it’s been a long and winding road to a career as a working artist – one that began as a young boy who loved cars and trucks and started sketching them at an early age. “I always liked forms and shapes,” he says. “I was taken with the sculpted styling of cars, and how things worked, as well.”

Over the years, Guy has done just about everything a car-loving kid might have dreamed about, from owning his dream ride (a “Big Bad Green” 1969 AMX muscle car) to restoring a rare 1966 Chrysler Imperial Crown Convertible and designing vehicles which previously existed only in his imagination.

A 1980 graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, Guy wanted to work as an automotive designer but found that career path blocked by a slumping car industry wrenched by competition with Japanese automakers. Instead, he took a job with the toymaker Tonka, where he ended up designing new versions of the toys he grew up with, including the iconic Mighty Dump Truck. After Tonka was purchased by Hasbro in 1991, Guy created a series of outlandish combat vehicles for GI Joe action figures (with names like the “Conquest” and “Persuader”), from initial sketches to building working models. On the side, he was able to fulfill his life-long dream of designing a working vehicle – a fiberglass tour bus produced by a Warren boat company that was used by singer Tom Jones and other performers.

Guy worked at a variety of jobs after leaving Hasbro in 1997, including a freelance designer, a stint at a local company making elaborate toys for blowing bubbles, and, finally, several years spent selling Porsches at Inskip in Warwick. Those all turned out to be detours along the journey back to his childhood passion: drawing cars.

In 2012, Guy rolled out his newest venture, producing commissioned drawings and paintings of cars, trucks, motorcycles and boats for companies, collectors and others with a passion for chrome and horsepower. Projects have ranged from the relatively mundane (a Lin’s Propane truck) to the exotic (a colored sketch of a vintage 1935 Rosengart cabriolet that rode out World War II under a French haystack and is now owned by North Providence resident Ray Frechette). Hand drawn in marker, chalk and gouache, Guy’s works vary in price from about $375 to $1,400, depending on size and detail. A surprising number are commissioned by women like Ray’s wife, Nancy, who ordered one as a surprise birthday gift for her husband. “Each project brings a challenge,” says Guy.

“Each object has its own personality, and each represents a study of light and reflection and color.” One of his most recent projects, a gouache painting of a vintage car headlight, even ventures into the realm of the abstract.

Guy is exhibiting his work at North Kingstown’s new Studio 460 and has created a series of sketches for an upcoming exhibit of antique pedal cars at the Attleboro Art Museum, scheduled for April 9 to May 10. The latter “are a cross between toys and automotive design, and they’ve been a blast to do,” he says.

Shifting gears from thinking of himself as an artist rather than a designer has been an adjustment for Guy. “As opposed to industrial design, the manufacturing of a product, now it’s focusing on my fine-art abilities,” he says. “My wife is like, ‘wow – you’re saying it now’ – I’m an artist.”

Guy Cassaday, Rhode Island artist, toy design, car design, Studio 460, Attleboro Art Museum,

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