THE INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER 1000A SERIES

RE: THE INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER 1000A SERIES, an on going series of Drawings, Prints and Acrylic paintings.

Jack Cassady’s “The International Harvester 1000A Series”, is about a Pickup Truck and it’s adventures, the landscape, politics, the art scene, abstraction versus realism, juxtaposition and the digital experience.

The concept for this series originated in late winter of 1975.  Jack had spent the fall working road construction, and had the winter off to do his art.  He would take his mother’s dog Godza into the prairie for a run every day. He would leave the truck on the road and walk into the fields/bush, letting the dog to investigate his surroundings. There is not a lot of traffic in rural Alberta at the time and if you pulled off the road you would be stuck and you don’t want to be stuck in -30 degrees.  Jack always had his camera and at the time was working on a series of painting ”The Alberta Landscape”. The color of the sky reflected off the snow and the summer fallow fields was showing through, the truck was silhouetted against it. That was the start of the series.

Jack bought the 1966 pickup in 1972 and traveled to Toronto to attend art college (OCA), after graduation he travelled to the interior of B.C. to build a log house and live off the land, but that didn’t work out and he returned to Alberta, worked road construction, tried to make a living off his art, got a job teaching drawing at the Red Deer College, went out to Vancouver and then to the University of New Mexico/Tamarind Institute (grad studies), returned to Toronto via Alberta, where he resides today. This was all done in the pickup, Jack had to finally retire the truck when the gas prices of the 80’s made it impossible to use (large V8 engine/same as the school buses).

There are a few paintings in this series, but mostly Prints & Drawings. The prints have been exhibited in Canada and around the world.  A number of the prints & drawings are in public, corporate and private collections.