A Kid in a Wagon Painting a Hot Rod, an Interview with Scott Takes

By Ben Kaplan

Scott Takes wasn’t sure about his submission to Murals and More for the wall at Sacred Cow Tavern in Cedar Rapids Oak Hill neighborhood. He and his crew had checked out the wall, made of narrow wood siding, and knew it would be a bear to paint. They’d worked on a proposal, made sketches and renderings, and an hour before the deadline Takes was asking himself, “do I really want to paint this?” So he sat down and whipped up a completely different sketch and included it.

“It’s vibrant down here, we need a splash of color and we need some emotion,” said Takes, “that’s when I thought I wanted to do something slightly explosive and maybe kind of crazy.”

With minutes to spare before the application deadline he submitted his original proposal and a pencil sketch of a thrown together dragster, piloted by a cow, racing through the desert with a Pembroke Welsh Corgi standing proudly between the front wheels.

“What do I want to paint on this wall, because it’s going to be labor intensive,” said Takes, who loves old cars and motorcycles. The corgi in the mural is based on his own dog Lola, who loves hanging her head out the window during car rides. He was inspired by vintage hand painted automobile advertisements, the psychedelic sixties posters of Stanley Mouse, the wild custom cars of Ed Roth, and the airbrushed van murals of the 1970s and 1980s.

“I love that era. I was born in 1970, these are my childhood drawings that I would see and inspired me to create,” said Takes. “It’s your imagination. You picture yourself on a beautiful day wanting to rip around in a hot rod. As a kid when I was getting pulled in a wagon I was imagining stuff like this. You want to pop wheelies and you want to do burnouts.”