This is the way America used to eat, when it was on the road.

Diners, many run by ex-G.I.s, fed the traveling public that hit the road after World War II. Small and affordable, they promised the kind of meals mom made — at least until the national interstate highway system in the late 1950s bypassed small towns and the family-run cafes that nourished them.

“Most of the good diners have disappeared,” said John Baeder, whose photo-realist paintings of them, done over the past three decades, are hanging at the Asheville Art Museum through Oct. 26.

Baeder wanted to paint diners before they disappeared altogether.

“The diner is definitely an American icon,” he said. “Somehow the patina of time has made them more significant.”

Because of their settings and signage, no two diners are the same, even though companies like the Worcester Lunch Car Co., of Worcester, Mass., and Jerry O’Mahoney Diner Co., of Elizabeth, N.J., pumped out thousands of them from the 1910s to 1940s.

Baeder saw hundreds of them traveling by train from his boyhood home in Atlanta to Chicago. Born in South Bend, Ind., in 1938, he started taking photos of diners and other disappearing urban icons while he was an art director in New York.

“I liked the sense of intimacy of diners,” he said. “I saw them as temples from lost civilizations.”

At the time, Baeder didn’t know he would become a painter.

“I started collecting roadside postcards of diners and tourist camps and motels,” he said. “I saw the images as small paintings. So I thought I’d paint them and see what they looked like.”

Dents and all

What they look like are big postcards, or snapshots. In each, the diner is centrally framed in a way that suggests that Baeder is more concerned with capturing the subject than he is in presenting it with drama. The drama is in the diner’s passing and preservation.

Baeder works in the high and low points of diners, from the rust around the edges to the promise of tasty sandwiches and french fries inside.

The diners he depicts are in the condition you’d expect them to be decades after they were built — a little rusty and with more than a few dents. Many are closed.

“Famous Cottage, Lancaster, PA” (an oil on canvas work painted in 1979) is a vision of a street scene you’d see out of your second-rate apartment in a part of town you may or may not want your mother to visit. There’s nothing about the exterior of the Famous Cottage Café that’s inviting. It’s a place for regulars, the place you make your own soon after you move to town — a place for bottomless coffee and a stack of newspapers people have left behind.

Baeder has them from all over — the Blue Beacon in Newark, N.J., Lan Ting Chinese Kitchen in New York, Kings Chef in Colorado Springs, Colo., the Empire Diner in New York. Baeder worked his name into the earliest ones, made it part of the signage that advertise daily specials.

“There are these tongue-in-cheek details embedded some of the pieces that are an absolute hoot when you find them,” said museum executive director Pam Myers, who has eaten at the Empire Diner.

One of the strongest images, “Big Boy Bop,” came from an album cover he’d been hired to art direct for musician John Prine.

Someone at a party told Baeder there was a collection of 137 Big Boys, the iconic mascot of the Shoney’s restaurant chain, in a lot in Nashville.

Baeder, Prine and a photographer went out there to shoot Prine with them.

The record company didn’t like the concept, but Baeder painted one of the photos he took, of Big Boys dancing among themselves with double-decker patty melts over their heads.

He has one of the Big Boys in his backyard in Nashville.

“It’s my muse,” he said. “Every artist has a muse. The paint’s flaking off, though.”

The show was organized by the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Ga.

Originally published online here: http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200880801113