There are still a lot of old Fords on the road – or were when I painted this picture. I should say that there were a lot of old Fords on the road where I was – a very remote outpost where hard-bitten people roost in makeshift houses of a sort you don’t see in bigger places. Double-wides complete an architectural smorgasbord that might let in an country schoolhouse now and then. The Allegheny foothills, where this truck was roasting in a field, qualified as the remotest sort of country I had ever been – and have been to ever since. When you’re there, you’re as alone as people can be. If you decided to go around without an automobile, you could simulate pioneer conditions without even trying. I chopped wood there not because it was fun to do, but because a crude wood-stove warmed the house.

The woman I was with at the time owned a little farmhouse there – a work-in-progress she enjoyed tinkering with and I enjoyed fleeing when a project reared its ugly head. Family members had settled there, so she – we – had a formidable support system on which we could draw for showers, cooked food, and decent company. They were good, intelligent people who knew how to work hard and not hold it against people who could not.

This car was her father’s. He’d towed it out to the field, not as scrap, but as something he might fire up now and then. He’d removed the engine against potential vandals, but he said it worked – and I believed him. He was a very capable man who could fix anything. He’d been a barnstorming pilot when, if you made a mistake, it could kill you.

The truck might even stand in as a kind of portrait of the man. It had most of his character: it was sturdy, solid, but well-worn. Its original colors peeked out from a coat of dazzling rust. It was shapely as all functional things are. And it had outlasted its warranty. The old man had some sort of cancer then. I hear he’s still with us, so maybe he willed it to go. He was – and has obviously continued to be - that forceful.

Diane Tesler has made a specialty of old wrecks – though they are hardly the only subject she does. But she does them so definitively that you might even say that the subject is her personal property. Luckily, I did not know her when I did this painting, or I might have hesitated. She is a little like the subject herself: hard, lean, and indomitable. You don’t encroach on territory people like this have made their own.

The father died this year, past the age of ninety. Not only do they not make ‘em like that anymore, his passing demarcates an era from which the making of things has been superseded by other cultures. When you are good with your hands, there is a corresponding activity in your head that guides them. He was well-rounded that way, as many people who are now dismissed as tinkerers almost always are.