Creating a masterpiece - Dexter Brown
Friday ,15 July 2011
One of the highlights of the British GP week was the unveiling of the Force India Art Car. The unique machine was shown at prestigious events in London before the race, and at the team’s factory event on Sunday afternoon after the chequered flag.
The car is actually a VJM01 race chassis, as used by Giancarlo Fisichella during the 2008 season. Erik Meijer of Intentio Partners had the idea of creating an artwork, and with the support of Dr Vijay Mallya and the team, he contacted veteran motoring artist Dexter Brown.
The car has now been signed by many F1 celebrities, and after the Indian GP it will be auctioned to raise funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and Force India’s Academy for young Indian drivers.
Brown is a legend in his field, having been painting pictures of cars for five decades. His designs have been used as posters and race programme covers, and his original work commands big sums.
“I was contacted to have a go, and I was very pleased to say yes,” he says. “Generally I paint pictures, so it’s quite a different sort of challenge to scribble on a real car! I’ve done it twice before. I did a BMW some years ago, and then a Ferrari 348.
“The only thing I could possibly do with it is what I’ve done – basically an abstract pattern. It was four and half days work at Silverstone. I worked up a few preliminary ideas before I went, and I knew that when I got to see the car they would only be a base, because you’re very unaware of what sort of undulating surfaces you’re going to be dealing with.
“It’s a very nice car, and it has bits coming out all over the place – it’s from the time when they still had little wings everywhere! It gives you a lot of inspiration; you can feed off it and add your bits of paintwork. Hopefully they come together.”
Brown was given free rein, but he decided to focus on orange and green – the colours of the Indian flag and the inspiration for the livery of today’s cars.
“I just thought this was right, to pick the race colours. It reflected Force India’s generosity in the first place in donating a whole car. It was also a sort of framework that I thought I would have to work within – I like to have something to get round, or make use of.
“If it hadn’t been a Force India car I might have chosen some different colours – I haven’t really stopped to think about it, because it is what it is. It just made really good sense to have a go.
“I didn’t want to use the team colours literally out of the pot, so I’ve graded some of the greens and changed them slightly, and some of the oranges are paler here and there, just to give the feeling of light catching it.”
He says it was surprisingly easy to paint the car’s smooth, polished surfaces.
“It was basically artist’s acrylic paint, which was compatible with the white base. I gave it a key to start with – I scuffed it down a tiny bit with a very fine pumice cream – just to give the surface a little bit of grip for the paint. But the paint is so adaptable, you can paint on glass and it will be there forever.
“I didn’t want to be painting over things too much, I wanted the marks I put down to be the marks it had at the end. Very few alterations were done as I was going on, and I was kind of up against the clock anyway! It’s surprising how much pressure there was to make a decision then and there. You walk up to the car with a brush full of black paint and think, ‘Where am I going to put this?’”
In the end he went for a design that reflected his trademark impressionistic style, which is intended to suggest movement.
“Movement was the key element in what I was trying to do. I was hoping that whatever marks I made would look as though as they were helping the car to move. It became a design inspired by the way I would paint anyway. I wanted most of the concentrated paintwork to be near the centre of the car, so then it would look as though it was moving forwards from the design congregating on the centre.
“Of course, you’re never totally happy with the result, but I’m happy enough, within the time! And in a way the signatures will add a graphic element to it all.”
Credit: Force India (www.forceindiaf1.com)
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