The illustrator team Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman painted glamorous cars set in posh backgrounds, and their art was reproduced in magazine advertisements in the 1960s.
Their teamwork started before beginning each gouache painting.
According to Hemmings Motor News: "The men would each travel with their cameras, bringing home thousands of 35-millimeter slides. They would then sort them to find the most promising backgrounds. In the meantime, Art would take hundreds of photos of the feature cars at GM's Tech Center: 'I used the turntable and cherry picker to capture different angles, and took most of the photos I'd use for one year in a few days. We would match a car's view and a suitable situation-it was all carefully thought out. We'd then do a pencil sketch of the background, indicating the shape of the car, and figure out what the color scheme would be.'"
"If Art's car was to be placed on Van's background, he painted in opaque watercolor gouache on one-ply Strathmore art paper. 'If I was working on a convertible or a car with a detailed background, I'd often only do the body, cutting along the windowsill with an X-ACTO knife. I'd turn the car over and sandpaper the edges to a knife-point so that they wouldn't show on the background-then I'd rubber-cement both surfaces, and paint the roof or other details right on Van's background.'"
"Art's willingness to adapt his technique earned them great acclaim. 'We came up with a different way of rendering the paintings," he recalls. "I started cropping part of the car out of the picture, making it too large to fit the page...they had impact. Clients liked how single-page magazine ads usually showed a side-view of their car, but they were paying for 'X' square inches of space and using only fifteen percent. My idea was to show a larger front view, cropped-the near headlamps look the same as the far ones, anyway.'"
Read the rest of the Hemmings Feature about Art Fitzpatrick, by Mark J. McCourt
Thanks, Mike Geraghty
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