Automotive Art
Order a special painting of your classic motor car. Paintings are in acrylic or oil, on birch wood panel. Prices depend on the amount of detail involved and the size of the painting.
As a general guide, these are approximate prices for my original car art on wood panel:
25 x 50 cm $ 435 / £ 350
40 x 80 cm $ 1155 / £ 925
50 x 100 cm $ 1435 / £ 1150
For an accurate quote for your specific project, do please get in touch.
Portfolio
Available Original Paintings
Automotive Fine Art Prints on Canvas
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Hexagon Brabham BT44 (1974)
$95.00 – $245.00 This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
Fiat 500L – Canvas Print
$85.00 -
Alfa Romeo GT 1300 Junior – Canvas Print
$75.00 -
Jensen Interceptor Mk II – Canvas Print
$75.00 -
Jensen Interceptor Mk III – Canvas Print
$75.00 -
MGB Roadster – Canvas Print
$75.00 -
Car portrait: Fiat 130 Coupe (print)
$95.00
Car Art- a Brief History
The art of representing motor cars has been in a state of constant evolution ever since the birth of the automobile. The most beautiful car paintings, in my view, are the racing and travel posters from the 1920’s and 30’s. The very graphic, clearly defined and stylized representations of speed and form in these posters from the art deco period are probably the first major benchmark for car art as a genre.
The second benchmark, in my opinion, was the airbrush photorealism of the 1970’s. Today, automotive artists are working in a great variety of styles and I think we’ll eventually look back on this period as another major benchmark in the history of car art.
My Car Obsession
It was always a passion for design: Cars as complex sculptural objects. I was always creating my own car designs because the forms and colours were irresistible. And then there were the engine sounds: Living, breathing machines! And then; their movement! Cars possess a sense of life like no other human creation.
At 18 I strongly considered studying car design, and visited the design department at Ford, which was then headed in Europe by Uwe Bahnsen. This visit was enabled by a family friend, the legendary Norman. I remember Norman speaking in hushed tones about the even more legendary Robert Jankel, founder of Panther cars. At the time, the world of car design felt just too overwhelming and maybe too constricting as well. So I chose to study architecture, an allied discipline but not really about cars, unfortunately.
BEYOND DESIGN
You can see a car’s character, in the expressive volumes of its bodywork, its stance on the wheels, in the wheels themselves, and even in its ‘face.’ Each car has its own character, and I’m now rediscovering the challenge of capturing this in my car art. Perhaps the search for automotive beauty has brought me full circle to something beyond the physical. Aesthetics, after all, are a yearning for perfection, for a vision of the divine.
CAR ART AS ICON-PAINTING
My first foray back into the car world, after a break of some 40 years, was my Fiat 130 Coupe portrait. This was an experiment in depicting the interior and exterior of the car in one canvas. The next car painting I made was a portrait of my uncle’s old MGB GT on a piece of plywood. (You can read about it here ).
I now find myself making car art on wood panels in the same way that the traditional Greek Orthodox icon painters work: carefully, slowly, precisely, and with reverence for their subject. Here in the Holy Land, I constantly find myself returning to the transcendental, and so in a way, my car paintings on wood are icons themselves; spiritual offerings to the automotive gods !!!
SPECIAL CARS FROM MY LIFE
Seminal cars which were notable in my early automotive life were: 1966 Daimler 250 V8, 1968 MGB GT, 1973 Fiat 130 Coupe, 1975 Opel Manta Turbo (Broadspeed), 1966 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Berlina, and Fiats 600 and 850.
