All originals are professionally framed and ready to hang in your home or office. All originals come with high quality wood frames and triple mats in colors that compliment the painting. Acid free, conservation materials are used throughout.

TECHNICAL NOTES ON THE ORIGINAL ART WORK

People often ask me if I work from photographs or “do I make things up out of my imagination?” There is an old saying in photo-realism: “the more you make up the more made up it looks.” So, yes I work from photographs but that is an overly simple explanation to a complicated process. I am seldom without my camera as I am always looking for something interesting that I might include in a future painting. Each painting begins with a stack of photographs that I’ve shot in numerous locations. Very loose preliminary sketches in pencil serve to determine how the elements of several photographs might be combined to tell a story. Once the overall composition has been determined I use charcoal pencil to do a detailed but still, “loose” sketch on 2000 grit wet and dry sandpaper (manufactured by 3M). This initial sketch usually takes 5 to 6 hours depending on the complexity of the piece. As color is applied, I work from top to bottom and left to right, finishing the painting as I go. The impressionistic backgrounds are done using traditional "fat" pastel sticks and traditional pastel techniques. I use mostly Rembrandt pastels but I mix in some of the softer, more expensive brands as I finish. The detailed areas are done using pastel pencils. Here I prefer Carb-Othelos. The pencils are sharpened to a blunt point with an electric pencil sharpener and brought to a fine point with a sand board. Average time to complete a painting is 150 to 180 hours, approximately one hour per square inch!

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

It’s my goal with each new painting, to provide my customers with the most accurate and realistic paintings possible while still retaining the “feel” of a painting. To accomplish this I combine highly detailed vehicles with “looser” more impressionistic or “painterly” backgrounds. But I have larger objectives in mind. To me a good “car” painting should be more than a car on a page, it should tell a story. Whenever possible I include people in my paintings, people having a good time with their car. From my perspective the vehicle is one of the characters, often the main character, in a larger story that causes my viewers to share in the experience of what it would be like to actually own one of these cars. So when you look at one of my paintings, I hope you are pleased with the accuracy and detail but most of all I hope you laugh, smile, sigh and share in the dream!