Taxi Driver drawing

After doing the Bruce Lee drawing in the last post, I looked for other images that meant something to me.  Since I was a taxi driver for several years in both Orange County, California and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I've seen a lot of crazy stuff.  I even published a zine all about taxi driving once.  Cab driving isn't a normal job, it's actually set up like a small business... a very competitive business that requires working 80 to 110 hours a week sometimes.  You have to be pretty crazy to do it in the first place.  Among other things, it has the highest number of murders per capita of any job in the U.S.  I could go on and on, but taxi drivers deal with a really wide selection of humans, and see a lot of the dark side of society.  This may be why so many big names have played taxi drivers on film.  Bruce Willis played a futuristic taxi driver in the movie The Fifth Element.  Super model Cindy Crawford played a taxi driver in an 80's music video.  Acclaimed director Robert Altman played a taxi driver in the into to George Carlin's What Am I Doing In New Jersey comedy special.  Jamie Foxx played a taxi driver in the movie thriller Collateral.  Even Queen Latifah played a taxi driver in the movie Taxi, working with a young Jimmy Fallon.

But there's one taxi film that stands above them all.  That's Robert Deniro playing the disturbed cabbie Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's classic 1976 film Taxi Driver.  I saw a painting in Winston-Salem of that character that was just amazing.  So I knew I had to do it my own way.  As I was blowing up the initial photo, I accidentally cut off half of Deniro's face.  I loved it, and used that for the drawing.

For the words on the side, I wrote "Taxi Driver," and "Are you talkin' to me?"  The classic quote from the movie.  But I also added the words "Drive, Die, Cash."  Those words are not from the movie.  In one of the cabs I was driving, I flipped down the visor one day and on the roof above it was graffiti left by another driver.  It was scrawled in pen on the fabric of the roof.  There was a skull and crossbones, and around it were the words, "drive, die, cash."  To me that completely summed up that crazy occupation.  So I added them to this drawing, along with the yellow and checker pattern widely associated with old school taxis.  I was pretty stoked on this one.  Sharpies on paper, 12" X 18."