Custom Paint Jobs

Automotive art, once found mostly on garage walls, has gone mainstream.

Celebrities such as KNBC Channel 4 news anchor Paul Moyer hang it in their living rooms.

Everyday people do too. Car buffs Roger and Gerri Gibb have more than 55 pieces on display in their Irvine home--in the living room, the dining room, on the stairwell and over the family room fireplace.

After years of being dismissed by critics as mere commercial illustration, car art can now be found in mainline galleries and at auctions as well as at prestigious events such as the Pebble Beach and Newport Beach concours d’elegance.

And the ranks of painters and sculptors out to prove that the automobile is a legitimate subject for fine art are growing.

Paintings, sculptures and wall hangings of cars, trucks and motorcycles come in as many styles as landscapes and portraits. There’s Impressionism, Surrealism and even Abstract Expressionism.

More and more, it is art that “people are proud to hang on their walls,” said Ken Eberts, president of the Automotive Fine Arts Society.

The exclusive group of 26 artists, an invitation-only organization formed in 1983, stages exhibitions, publishes a fine-art journal and co-sponsors a children’s art contest that benefits charity--all with the aim of making car art respectable.

Eberts thinks the group’s efforts have paid off. William A. Motta, art editor of Road & Track magazine and art director for Open Road, agrees.

“We were striving for art that could be shown in any major gallery in New York or Los Angeles, and we have some members who have done that,” said Motta, a founding member of the auto artists group. Motta himself has had a New York show.

Art critics still haven’t embraced automotive art on the whole, he said, but the society is moving in the right direction and seeking new artists for membership, among them one painter who focuses on textures and people. The car is in the background, almost incidental.

Size also plays a role in acceptability, Motta said. A 10-by-12-inch illustration doesn’t have the same effect as a 24-by-36-inch work, and automotive art has gotten larger--artist Nicola Wood’s pieces are usually 4 by 5 feet.

Pioneer automotive artist Harold Cleworth of Venice Beach also has found that he likes big art. He typically works with 5-by-6-foot pieces. In his 20 years in the field, Cleworth has seen his style change--from high-gloss illustration to a more painterly textured brush stroke on canvas. He is best known for a striking head-on painting of a black Mercedes-Benz gull-wing coupe with the doors up. Limited-edition prints went quickly, and when it was issued as a poster, more than 200,000 copies were sold.

Size isn’t the only thing that has gone up. Prices are rising too. Cleworth says his works go for $12,000 to $18,000 these days, up from $2,500.

A racing scene by pioneer car artist Peter Helck set a record for the genre in 1993, said Miles Morris, vice president of Christie’s International Motorcars. The painting, depicting a 1908 road race and titled “Robinson Comes Through,” went for $90,500.

Helck, who painted in the 1920s and ‘30s, was an automotive illustrator and a mainstream fine artist as well. He was part of realist school.

Today, though, an automotive artist is as likely to trace his roots to Monet or Dali as to Rembrandt.

Wood and her “Delahaye in Death Valley,” shown at last year’s Pebble Beach concours, represent the new breed.

In the large oil, bright afternoon sun winking off a seductive, nail-polish-red paint job accents the sinuous lines of a 1939 Delahaye. But the car is parked on yards and yards of leopard-skin fabric in the midst of a desert. It’s a surrealistic scene with a woman, a leopard and wind-sculpted sand dunes in the frame. Still, the car clearly is the subject of the painting.

Transplanted English artist Wood is a former textile designer who didn’t start painting cars until she saw her first 1959 Cadillac, driving down Melrose Avenue.

“That’s not a car, it’s a piece of rolling sculpture,” she marveled. So she painted it.

That was 10 years ago, and Wood hasn’t stopped painting cars. The Los Angeles artist puts together disparate bits of Americana that she loves, such as Marilyn Monroe striking a pose near a gleaming red-and-white 1957 Bonneville. Or a cerise ’59 Cadillac sitting on a cloud of satin, flanked by giant lipsticks.

“I’m recording California in a funny sort of way. I don’t consider them car paintings; I consider them paintings with cars in them,” said Wood, who studied at the Royal Academy of Art in London.

She is one of a handful of women in the automotive art field. Another, Laguna Beach watercolorist Susan Cox, says she sees herself as an artist and her lack of formal training in automotive design--something many male automotive artists do have--as a plus.

“Men stop and talk to me about the chassis of a Delahaye. I don’t know what they are talking about. I’m not mechanical at all,” she said. “It’s a visual thing with me. I like those lines.”

So do others.

Cars have even attracted the positively mainstream Franklin Mint, which has contracted with Wood to put four of her pieces on collectible plates.

And images of woodies and race cars joined more traditional subjects at last summer’s Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, a juried art show with a reputation for being highly selective.

“It isn’t the place you expect to see automotive art,” said Mitch Ridder, a graphic artist who was surprised that his watercolors of Indianapolis-type race cars were accepted for the show.

Who buys the art?

Automotive artists say many of their customers are women. Some are clearly buying pieces for a husband or other car buffs of the male persuasion, but many buy the works for themselves. Most automotive art today tells a story, Eberts says, and the appeal is at that level. Because few pieces of automotive art are “just paintings of cars,” they catch the eye of more than just car nuts, he says.

Buyer motivation has changed too. When he started doing automotive art in 1968, Eberts called it Americana and concentrated on cars from 1910 to 1930. Those who bought the Temecula watercolorist’s early pieces wanted the artwork because it reminded them of their first car or a car their parents had.

Then Eberts was discovered by automobile collectors who wanted paintings of cars they owned or coveted.

One of the many pieces owned by the Gibbs, for instance, is a painting of a 1941 Packard 180 Sport Brougham--just like the real one the Packard buffs own and entered in the 1998 Newport Beach concours.

The couple saw the painting before they owned the car, Gerri Gibb recalls.

“But Roger said, ‘Someday I’m going to have a 180, so let’s buy this now.’ We did, and later we got the car,” she said with a smile.

Cox tells a similar story about a man who bought one of her first car paintings, an 8-by-10 of a Ferrari Testarossa.

“The man came back the next year and told me he liked the painting so much he had to buy a Ferrari. Now, I see him driving around town,” said Cox, who switched from landscapes to cars six years ago.

But she and Eberts agree that more and more car art buyers are buying art that they like, not pictures of cars that they want.

And though not many pieces bring the prices a work by Helck can fetch, Cox said she gets as much as $2,500 for an original watercolor, and that her prints start at $350.

By Eberts’ estimate, original works by Automotive Fine Arts Society members range from $1,000 to $100,000. For nascent art buyers, the group puts out a brochure on selecting and purchasing automotive art.

What about car art as an investment?

Consider Wood’s works. When she started out 10 years ago, she sold her paintings for $4,000. Now, her large oils like “Delahaye” routinely sell for about $25,000.

You can buy a real car for that, but it might not be the car of your dreams.

Here’s the way Motta sees it:

“Take a wonderful painting of a Porsche, for example. If it’s well done, you’ll feel like you are driving it every time you look at it.”

If you can’t afford the car, he says, it’s a way to partially fulfill the dream.

And think of the gas you’ll save.

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Resources

Automotive Fine Arts Society

The society’s brochure on car art can be ordered by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to AFAS, P.O. Box 613, Temecula CA 92593. For information on the society’s quarterly journal, call editor Jack Juratovic at (248) 814-0627.

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Artist Web Sites

Susan Cox, paintings and prints

https://www.artseek.com/artbysusan

Steve Posson, sculpture

https://www.possonart.com

Nicola Wood, paintings and prints

https://www.nicolawood.com

Jay Koka, paintings and prints

(The site also displays the work of several AFAS artists, including Ken Eberts)

https://www.nitebridge.com