Bill Rakocy "Red Auto" 1976 Watercolor — Portrait of El Paso Car Dealer Dick Poe

A 1976 mixed-media watercolor by Bill Rakocy (1920–2009), the El Paso–based painter, muralist, and chronicler of the borderland. The composition centers on a candy-apple red 1970s Pontiac Grand Prix — its stacked quad headlamps, split vertical grille, and long sculpted hood rendered in saturated reds against a dusty desert foreground. Behind the car, two figures stand before a low-slung showroom building, with jagged purple mountains rising to a yellow-orange sky. The figure at right is a portrait of Dick Poe, the El Paso auto dealer whose family dealerships have been a fixture of the borderland's commercial landscape for generations and continue to operate today.

Signed "Bill Rakocy 1976" in ink at lower right, with a secondary monogram and date "WR 76" at lower left. The verso carries the artist's hand-inscribed studio notation: "Red Auto 1970-80 / Bill Rakocy Studio / Nov. 1976," over the Strathmore watercolor paper blindstamp. Rakocy's work documented the people, businesses, and characters of El Paso and southern New Mexico across six decades; this sheet sits squarely in that documentary tradition, treating a local dealership and its proprietor with the same painterly attention he gave to historic missions and Rio Grande landscapes.

William "Bill" Rakocy (1920–2009) was a Pennsylvania-born, El Paso–based artist, author, and publisher whose career spanned painting, printmaking, muralism, and regional history writing. A WWII veteran, he worked in watercolor, oil, pastel, and ink across more than five decades on the border, producing thousands of works documenting the people and places of the El Paso–Las Cruces corridor. Through his Bravo Press imprint he self-published numerous illustrated books on regional history — Billy the Kid, frontier saloons, border landmarks, and civic figures. His work is held in private and institutional collections throughout southern New Mexico and west Texas.

Dick Poe was a prominent El Paso automobile dealer whose name became synonymous with the city's mid- to late-twentieth-century car business. The Poe family dealerships remain in operation in El Paso today. Rakocy's inclusion of an identifiable local businessman alongside a specific late-model vehicle places this work in his documentary-portrait tradition rather than his landscape output.

CONDITION

Very Good with no remarkable damage. Paper is bright with minor handling at the deckled edges. Unframed.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Sheet: 15" × 20"
• Image (visible): 13.5" × 18.5"
• Medium: Mixed media, primarily watercolor on Strathmore paper
• Signed and dated lower right: "Bill Rakocy 1976"
• Monogrammed lower left: "WR 76"
• Verso inscribed: "Red Auto 1970-80 / Bill Rakocy Studio / Nov. 1976"
• Unframed