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ORIGINAL PAINTINGS ON WOOD PANEL BY DARIUS GILMONT
A NEW TRADITION IN MOTORING ART
My automotive art was born from a passion for the motor-car, for design and for the art-making process. Each of my wood panel paintings is an icon in itself; a homage to automotive beauty.
It was always a passion for design: Cars as complex sculptural objects that moved: literally, automotive art. 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. I studied architecture, an allied discipline but more about things that don’t actually have wheels!
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.
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. I sometimes see my car paintings on wood as icons themselves; spiritual offerings to the automotive gods !!!
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.
