The body shop at Bill DeFouw Chevrolet in Lafayette, Ind., is accustomed to working on four-wheeled – not four-legged – objects. But that didn’t stop the shop from repairing 15 four-legged works of art to save the town’s summer celebration.
The creatures in question – life-sized, hand-painted, fiberglass statues of dogs – were set up throughout the city for its “Dog Days of Summer” public art exhibition, the Journal and Courier reported. Local artists painted the statues, and many were vandalized, leaving them cracked and sometimes without limbs. Body shop manager Steve Smith and his crew worked to patch the pooches and applied clearcoat to protect their custom paint jobs from the elements – and future vandalizing.
“We fit as many as we could in the booth and sprayed as many as we could at once,” Smith said.
This isn’t Smith’s first time repairing works of art for the city. For previous exhibitions “Hog Wild!” and “Frog Follies,” Smith’s crew also applied clearcoat to large statues of pigs and frogs and patched up the work of vandals. However, the dog statues were easier targets than previous art projects, Smith told the newspaper.
“Basically, they were a little smaller than the hogs and frogs, which made it easier to damage them and steal them,” he said. “We had to repair a lot more dogs than we did the hogs and frogs, at least 70 percent more.”
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For more information on the “Dog Days of Summer,” visit www.lafayettedogdays.com.
