Learn how to commission bespoke automotive fine art on metal. Expert guide to commissioning luxury one-of-a-kind paintings for collectors, galleries, and high-end interiors.
Commissions start at $5,000. Where a particular painting lands above that depends on size and complexity, and a large piece runs to $50,000. Expect two to four months. Send whatever photographs you have, including old ones and badly lit ones, as long as they are not pixelated.
What follows covers what those photographs need to show, how to choose the size, what to ask before you agree to anything, and what changes when the car is no longer yours.
You almost certainly already have what a painter needs
The usual worry is that the photographs are not good enough. They generally are. Any photograph can be worked from, including old ones and badly lit ones, as long as it is not pixelated, which is the one thing that cannot be recovered. A soft snapshot from fifteen years ago holds more usable information than most people expect. A heavily compressed image saved and resaved until the edges have gone to mush holds almost none.
So the first thing to do is not to go out and shoot anything. It is to gather what exists. Look in the places photographs of a car accumulate: the sale listing, the insurance file, the folder from the day it was collected, the pictures somebody else took at an event. Send more than feels reasonable and let the artist choose. The one you are least proud of is often the one that catches the stance.
If you are going out to take new ones, the single thing worth avoiding is bright sun. Hard midday light blows the highlights off the bodywork into flat white and drops a black shadow down the side, and between them they hide the two things that make a car recognizable, which are the shape of the panels and the way the paint turns as it curves. An overcast day is better photographic weather than a beautiful one.
Something you can do this afternoon, for nothing. Put every photograph of the car you can find into one folder, then look at it as a set rather than one at a time. You will see immediately whether you have the front three quarter view, the profile, the detail somebody will ask about, and something with the car in a place that meant something. That folder is the brief. It is worth more than any description you could write.
The size is the part people get wrong
Almost nobody finishes a commission wishing it were smaller.
A car is a wide object, and a painting of one has to be wide enough to let it move. Below a certain size the shape stops reading as speed and starts reading as a picture of a vehicle, which is a different and much less interesting thing to live with. This matters more than usual with automotive work because of where it tends to hang: a garage wall, an office, a showroom, a room with a high ceiling and directional lighting, spaces where you see the piece from across the room far more often than from three feet away.
So decide the size from the distance you will actually stand at, not from the dimensions on a page. Mark the rectangle out on the wall in masking tape or newspaper, then go and stand where you normally stand, with the lights you normally have on. Leave it up for two days and walk past it. People who do this come back asking for something larger, and they come back certain instead of hopeful.
Photograph the wall with the shape on it and send that too. It tells the artist about the light in the room, the height, and what else is competing for attention, all of which change how a painting should be built.
Decide whether you want the car, or the feeling of it
This is the conversation that prevents nearly all disappointment in commissioned work, and it is worth having out loud at the start.
One version of this painting is a record. It is recognizably that car, that color, those wheels, and its job is accuracy. The other version is an interpretation, where color and surface are doing the work and the car is the subject rather than the specification. Both are legitimate. They are not the same commission, and an artist cannot read which one you meant from a photograph.
Say which you want in plain words. If you want it close to the photograph, say so. If what you actually loved was how the thing felt at speed on a particular road, say that instead, because that is a paintable idea and make it look like the picture is a different brief entirely.
It is also worth knowing when not to commission at all. If what you want is an exact record of how the car looked on one particular day, a very good photographer will serve you better and cost less. A painting is an interpretation. That is its whole value and also its whole risk.
What to ask before you agree to anything
Ask to see a painting of a car the artist did not own. Anyone can make a convincing image of a machine they have walked around for years. Working from somebody else's photographs of somebody else's car is the harder skill, and it is the one you are buying.
Ask what they paint on, and why that surface rather than another. Different grounds behave differently under paint and under gallery lighting, and an artist who has chosen deliberately will be able to tell you what the choice buys you. An artist who has not will change the subject.
Ask how changes are handled, and get the answer in writing before anything starts. Not because artists are slippery, but because a few adjustments means something different to each of you, and it is a great deal easier to agree while the surface is still empty.
And ask what it costs and how long it takes. Two painters of similar standing can be a factor of ten apart for the same piece, so a range on somebody else's website tells you very little about the person you are actually talking to. The figures at the top of this page are this studio's own.
When the car is already gone
A good share of these commissions are for cars that have been sold, written off, or belonged to somebody who has died. If that is why you are reading this, it is an ordinary thing to ask for and you do not need to explain it.
Practically, less changes than people fear, because the work is done from photographs either way. What changes is that the photographs you already have are now the entire record, so send all of them, including the technically poor ones. A badly lit picture taken on a phone in a driveway can carry more of a car than a professional shot on a stand, because it has the driveway in it.
There is no deadline on this, whatever it feels like. Take the time to choose.
About the artist
Gabrielle Benot is a contemporary artist based in California, working across metal, canvas and mixed media. She paints in her own Guscio technique, a method she named from the Italian for shell, which grew out of layering pigment on metal substrates. She is from Latvia and trained in fashion design in Copenhagen at Margrethe Skolen.
Her automotive work sits alongside a commission record in portraiture: five thoroughbreds painted for their owners, plus a commissioned portrait of Secretariat.
Commissions and questions go through gabriellebenot.com/contact. Existing work is at shop.gabriellebenot.com.