The bed of a pickup truck is probably the last place most of us would go looking for art.

The pickup truck has one job: to haul things. We fill the beds with wood, bricks, dirt, furniture, boxes, people, camping gear, tools, food, stuff and more stuff  … then we haul it from Point A to Point B.

Job well done.

Sometimes the pickup bed becomes a collecting point for junk, leftovers, bits and pieces. Stuff that will hang around until it is swept it out.

That stuff has the makings of a self-selecting form of collage art.

At first, it sits scattered, indefinable as anything other than trash — until the laws of physics kick in.

All it takes is for a heavy-footed driver to slam on the brakes a few times and all that trash slides to the front of the bed where it self-sorts, compresses, stacks, and settles.

Curious and vaguely indefinable patterns of texture, color, composition, light, and materials form in the first three feet of the pickup bed.

I dare say that when you frame it, isolate it, and capture it as an image, a collage — detritus can become art.

Who hasn’t heard the expression “One man’s trash is another man’s art”?

At the least, I find these images that you see here to be intriguing in the abstract. They were all taken from the back of pickup trucks parked in Colonia San Antonio, in San Miguel de Allende, itself a city that has been called a work of art.

As forensic anthropology, each pickup bed tells a little story, much as the scars on the body of a humpback whale tell the story of a life lived in brutal environs.

Maybe this isn’t the kind of art you’d hang on gallery walls.

These are little meditative pieces that pull you in until the details give the story shape and continuity.  The story is yours alone.

ART:  It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone. — Wm. Joseph Nieters