Life, art & the road

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Apr 11, 2008 - Page: 1E - UPDATED: 12:40 a.m.

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In two years, Transit Antenna could be a mail-order art studio, a washateria or an American art success story.

As the 6 1/2  artists pulled onto the LSU campus, the crew was still learning to live in a converted city bus and keep their ride’s vegetable oil-fueled engine running.

“We have a small house, I guess,” said 9-year-old Taylor Snead, son of full-grown artists Bob and Dawn Snead.

The Sneads, Amy McBrine, Josef Kristofoletti, Seth Gadsden and Jamie Self left Charleston, S.C, about two months ago in a two-vehicle caravan — a 26-year-old city bus and a 1989 Pace Arrow RV.

“We’ve tried to stay away from a modus operandi,” said Bob Snead, 28, whose master’s degree in painting is from Yale University.

“Originally, it was Dawn and me talking about going across the country,” Snead said.

“The conversation grew,” Dawn said.

The artists, who know each other from undergrad or  graduate school and working in Charleston, raised the money to buy the RV and bus and left town.

“Joe and Amy live in the RV and we store some stuff and do some cooking in it,” said Gadsden. “There are five of us in the bus.”

“This is research and development, not career advancement,” said Snead, the oldest of the artists who range in age from 24 to 28.

The artists talked to visitors about their nonspecific quest and their penchant for kitschy tourist attractions like Weeki Wachee, Fla., a town of nine people whose mayor is a former “mermaid” at Weeki Wachee Springs; alligator farms and the carnie town of Gibsonton, Fla., where an old carnival hand named John “Capt. Flash” Sanguedolce greeted the artists with “You guys running on grease?”

“We definitely smell like Chinese food,” said Snead whose duties include working on the bus’s vegetable oil fuel system.

Sanguedolce and his brothers are big proponents of vegetable oil-powered vehicles. Visit them online at http://www.greasebrothers.com/.