It used to be a boring white 1993 Saturn with dings and dents.

Now it’s an acid trip on wheels.

Nancy Knauf, 54, did a Jackson Pollock on her car. She swirled it with colorful acrylic paint. Then, armed with a glue gun, she festooned the car, inside and out, with random smatterings of costume jewelry, plastic flowers, yarn, toys, sunglasses. (That’s her story… maybe the paint was still wet when she plowed through a yard sale.)

“It’s an art car,” she said.

Functional art, that is. “It’s an anti-hail, anti-theft paint job. Nobody has ever vandalized my car.”

Probably because they fear becoming a hood ornament.

“It’s very garish,” she said. “There are certain adults who’d be mortified. I don’t have that mortification.

“A lot of people take pictures. They say, ‘Look at all the crap on that car.’”

She’s proud of that crap.

It expresses her inner child. And it’s recycling.

“There are a lot of different reasons for art. It’s not whether it’s good or bad art. It’s how it affects people. It’s a way to connect.”

Her creative trail spills from the paint-stained driveway to a nearby fence, a 20-foot-long canvas of shoes, crafts, tools, peace signs and you-name-it.

It doesn’t stop there.

Nancy gave me a tour of her aqua-with-salmon-trim bungalow near downtown.

The bedroom matched the car that matched the fixtures she decoupaged.

I sat on the art couch and got poked in the neck by plastic flowers.

I stepped on a hot glue gun. It connected me with what Nancy endures for art.

“Look at all the burns on my arms,” she said.

“In the morning while we’re having coffee she’ll grab the glue gun and go at it,” said her husband, Frank.

She hasn’t decorated Frank. Yet. But he sometimes drives her art car. “Usually to the liquor store to buy her wine,” he said.

She had a different art car when they met 10 years ago.

That’s right. Nancy is a serial car painter. The Saturn isn’t her first victim. The last was a Toyota with a plastic fruit theme, dubbed “Little Shop of Horrors.”

She didn’t get the family’s science gene. “I was a creative kid. My dad (Dr. Robert Knauf) said, ‘You’re either crazy or you’re a genius,” she said. “My twin sister is the opposite. She always says, ‘I’m Kathie Lee (Gifford) and you’re Cher.’”

Nancy got a degree in English, not art, because her parents wanted her to major in something practical. (It worked: Emily Dickinson poems dangle in a mobile in her art car.)

She waits tables at Marigold Café in a white-shirt uniform.

“I go to work and have to follow the rules,” she said. “This is a way of letting go. I guess some people think I’m a little goofy.”

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Nancy Knauf and her art car Photo by ANDREA BROWN/THE GAZETTE

Inside the art car Photo by

One of the many hood ornaments on the art car Photo by