The Fiat 130 Coupe

Automotive Artwork

This automotive art piece depicts the elegant and powerful Fiat 130 Coupe. Designed by Paolo Martin for Pininfarina, it was a large grand-touring car produced from 1971 to 1977. One of these rare and very expensive cars became our family car in about 1974. It was a most amazing and unusual car bought by a predecessor of my father’s at the privately-owned company where he worked, and we had many memorable trips in it. Later on, when my father moved jobs, the cars became much more mundane! It was hard to forgive him such an irresponsible decision, but I’ve just about come to terms with it now.

Re-discovering car art

This is my first work of automotive art in many years. I made car drawings all through my schooldays and beyond. I designed cars of my own, and at some point seriously considered going into car design as a profession. Starting this painting (acrylics on canvas), I really struggled with the composition. I wanted to show the luxurious interior of the car, with its deep velour seating and huge windows letting in so much light. I also wanted to show the exterior with its most wonderful clarity of line and elegance of proportion.

Art of the automotive narrative

Being so used to making narrative art, I was certain I needed a story to tell in this picture, so I worked in some figures who seemed to be developing a relationship with the car. I lived with these people in the picture for a while. I gave them identities and names. They were based roughly on colleagues of my Dad’s as I remembered them. However, I gradually felt more and more uncomfortable with them and the colour-scheme they brought with them. They conflicted with the presence of the car, which was simply a piece of automotive art or sculpture that I wanted to represent. I decided to remove all the people and the other cars, making it purely and simply a homage to the beauty of Paolo Martin’s design.

This artwork was an exercise in nostalgia: Nostalgia for the car and the daily life it helped to enhance, and nostalgia for my own love of automotive design to which I’ve happily reconnected!

The photos below show how the picture progressed from outline sketch to finished piece.

There is quite a nicely written appreciation of the Fiat 130 Coupe at: auto-didakt.com

You can buy a fine art print of this painting here.

First pencil sketch on the canvas, setting out the interior of the car, while outside is a tentative sea view with pine trees and a classical urn with flowers. This was a Mediterranean setting recalling a trip to Barcelona we made in this car one summer.

Not yet sure about the background, I painted it out and focused instead on building up the interior colour layers and detail. I’ll never make perfectly detailed, technically accurate car images: I’m aiming to convey the atmosphere of the car instead. The perspective here is not 100% accurate, but it shows what is important to me.

The luxurious interior of the Fiat 130 Coupe is here being admired by a prospective buyer in a London showroom, circa 1974. His fiance admires the car but seems a bit concerned, doubtless because of the cost. A friend of the couple, in a stylish burgundy velvet suit, crouches to admire the design. In the showroom are also the simple Fiat 128 and another of my favourite designs, the Fiat 124 Sport. In the centre is a rear three-quarters view of the Fiat 130 Coupe itself. A Daimler Fleetline bus, new in 1974, can be seen in the street beyond.

Step by step, I removed the figures and then the background by painting them over with layers of opaque white. I added a miniature of the car on the rear arm-rest, to show a front three-quarters view. In the end, I also painted this out because I couldn’t get the proportions right and I simply ran out of patience!

The final painting: Fiat 130 Coupe, Acrylic on Canvas, 36cm x 60cm