I saw an ad in the Detroit Free Press for an entry level job opening for a person with some scientific training and good color vision. When I applied, I mentioned I had taken many science classes in High School, Organic Chemistry & Physics in college. My color vision was tested under 3 kinds of illumination & I confirmed what I already knew, that even though I was cursed with extreme myopia from childhood, my color vision was super acute. I could even see a slightly different spectrum with each eye, green with my left & magenta with my right, enabling me to perceive a spectrum of thousands if not millions of colors.

I was hired as a Paint Chemist. Cook Paint & Varnish Company’s biggest customer was Ford Motor Company, & they were producing (at the time) the new acrylic enamel for automobiles.

My job was to formulate new blends & colors, spray them on primed steel panels & ship them out to various test locations to see how they held up under a variety of temperatures & weather conditions.

It was a very interesting job, as relatively new acrylic enamel formulas were replacing the alkyd enamels that were the previous standard in automotive paint. I quickly picked up advanced skills because it related to my art interests. One interesting project was making a batch of paint to paint one of the Shah of Iran’s cars, a special Cadillac that was “Candy Apple Red”, made by combining an underlayer of aluminum flakes with a layer of transparent red. I got a look at the custom schematics, the trunk was expanded to house a prone bodyguard who could fire a machine gun through a port usually covered by the rear license plate.

There was an unused box of glass plates in a dusty storeroom. They stimulated an idea inspired by a movie of Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock making his art that I saw in a college class the previous year.

Pollock said “My paintings are motion made visible, memories arrested in space”. This made sense, as I had already pursued my love of calligraphy for several years, and this style of painting was interesting. I got permission from my boss to use the glass plates for my project, using transparent colored acrylic enamels that I formulated, then applied with gestures using spatulas, sticks, pouring etc. then fired in the paint oven. This was done after I clocked out at the end of the workday. I further worked them with crystallized aquarium paint after the initial firing.

About two dozen of these were made. The examples are the survivors that remained unbroken after many changes of address. About 7 years ago they were imported into Photoshop using the trans illumination feature of my scanner.

While I was at CP&V, I helped organize a new local of the Teamsters. As a member of the Detroit working class I was a big fan of Jimmy Hoffa the charismatic leader of the union. A few years later,  I worked as an assembly line worker & later as a fork driver for Cadillac, I became a member of the United Auto Workers, whose founder Walter Reuther was also a hero of mine. My nickname was “Robbie the robot”.