News

Tailgate art honors veterans and war dead

Charlie Hardin poses with scene of Arlington National Cemetery painted by Andrea Martin.

By Bill Moss, Published: May 23, 2015

When Charlie Hardin decided he wanted a scene of Arlington National Cemetery on his pickup tailgate, he thought of RuthEllen Boerman, a family friend and a professional artist.

Hardin’s daughter, Marti Garren, had another idea. She thought of Boerman’s daughter.
“She said, 'Why don’t you get Andrea to do it?'” Hardin recalled.
Andrea was Marti’s good friend, Andrea Martin, a Hendersonville native and East Henderson High School graduate who works as a CAD designer in Asheville.
“I wasn’t painting,” Martin said. “She just believed in me.”
Martin had been raised not to fear the unknown or retreat from the untried.
“Because of my parents, I thought there’s not much I can’t do,” she said. “I figured I’d give it a whirl. I figured worst case, I can call in my mom and she can do it, which I didn’t have to do. They believed in me.”
Hardin's faith was rewarded weeks later when he first laid eyes on a remarkable depiction of America's most prominent military cemetery.
“I tend to be a patriotic person and sort of a history buff,” said Hardin, who was discharged as a staff sergeant after serving in the Hendersonville-based Army National Guard for six years in the ‘60s. “There’s a tremendous amount of history in that piece of property as well as all the fallen from all the wars ever since the War Between the States.”
Andrea MartinHis order was simple and specific.
“I wanted (Gen. Robert E.) Lee’s house and the soldiers getting ready for the three-shot volley,” he said. “I wanted the caisson and I wanted the tombstones but I especially wanted the Tomb of the Unknowns.”
Left to right, Martin delivered it all: Tomb of the Unknowns guarded by a sentinel from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, headstones in a straight line to a tree-lined horizon, seven riflemen ready to fire the honorary volley, a horse-drawn caisson bearing a flag-draped casket and the Confederate general’s childhood home atop a hill beneath wispy white clouds floating in a light blue sky.
“Mostly it’s ‘Wow,’” Hardin said when a reporter asked about people's reaction to the tailgate art. “Just like you did. That’s the first word out of their mouth.”

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Martin’s DNA gave her a gift for art she had never tapped and an emotional tie to the military that she had never fully appreciated.
“I got into this because my grandfather was a career Army man and it impacted my dad’s life so much,” she said. Jefferson Busbee Sr. served here and abroad while his family, including Andrea’s father, Jeff Busbee Jr., stayed home in Hendersonville.
“He was never home,” she said. “He was in World War II, he was in the Korean War, he got a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.
“My dad never cried unless the national anthem came on. I would look over and he would always have tears, whether it was a football game, whether it was a race. As a young child it just always showed me — this is a big deal. He paid a lot for this; his dad was never home.”
The same love of country and appreciation for the sacrifice of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines overcomes Martin, too, when she works. Andrea Martin painted the Vietnam Memorial for Tom Riddle (right). [PHOTO COURTESY OF ANDREA MARTIN]After she painted Arlington, she got an order from Hardin’s friend, Tom Riddle, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Asheville. He asked her to paint the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
“I wanted it to be as authentic as possible,” Martin said. “I wanted every name on the wall to be authentic. I went to virtualwall.com and it has every name of every person that died from every county so I went through the counties and I looked up all the people who passed in Vietnam from Western North Carolina and I put all of their names on that wall.”
She felt like she was attending dozens of funerals.
“When I paint those names I can’t help but get teary eyed,” she said, “because they’re real names, and I have a son, and they’re real people. That’s just how I am.”

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It’s painstaking and time-consuming work, not that Martin has a ton of free time to devote to it. Her customers take off the tailgates. Her studio is a beach towel-covered coffee table in her living room.
“I work fulltime,” she says. “I’m a single mom. There’s breakfast, there’s dinner, shower, homework, bath and then at 9 or 10 o’clock I’d start painting. There were some days I didn’t touch it because we had so much going on.”
When she did pick up a brush, she gave her full devotion.
When she painted Arlington, she redid the tombstones six times before she was satisfied she had them lined up straight. She was meticulous about the lettering of every name of the Vietnam War dead.
“Just the names was probably six or seven hours of painting,” she said. “There was a lot of experimenting because I hadn’t painted before.”
She uses acrylic paint then takes the tailgates to Gibbs body shop, which clear-coats them.
She’s working on two more patriotic-themed orders and also has gotten jobs to paint a scene for a church and to paint a farm sign.
Nothing inspires quite like the images that honor the military. She donates 10 percent of her proceeds to the Western North Carolina Chapter of Sheep Dog Impact Assistance, which helps veterans who come home from deployments. As she’s gotten close to veterans and heard their story, she’s become even more passionate about honoring their service.
“Like Tom, he fought 40 years ago, and he still has a hard time talking about it,” she said. “I thought, once you’re out of the war, you’re blessed, you’re lucky, you’re glad to be home. But I’ve come to the realization that they’re not. They live it in their head every day.”
Riddle “lost five of his friends there, including his best friend,” she said. “That made me aware that we need to do more for these guys. Once they get home, they’re still not home. I want to do everything they can to show them my respect and thankfulness.”

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Andrea Martin can be reached by emailing designstudiowest@live.com. Find out more on her Facebook page.