Many car enthusiasts are becoming more and more aware of the beauty of automotive art. Such car lovers are the ones who drive the car art market. The automotive sculptural and painterly elements can be found somewhere between the necessities and luxuries of everyday life. Car enthusiasts appreciate the automotive splendor in terms of its form and shape, composition and line, texture and color, which had led them to appreciating automotive art as well, that is the work of those who can express such splendor in bronze, through a lens or on canvas. The appreciation has reached such an extent, that car art has been identified as its own genre, through the work of established artists. Other car art enthusiasts have established automotive art societies, to show that their passion goes beyond a mere hobby.



But automotive art appreciation to such an extent is relatively new. Only in the early eighties ahs car art become recognized as a field an d we can say that up to those days it didn’t even exist. The only form of automotive art back then was the individual work of a few artists who were so passionate about the subject that they started painting cars. The first form of an automotive art society was an alliance of relatively few artists, who wanted to be able to keep to date with what was new in this field and exchange ideas.

However, if we refer to automotive art as a means for automotive advertising, than its history goes way beyond the 1980s, all the way to the beginning of the twentieth century when ads and brochures for cars were paintings made by artists. This is the reason why the painting s of a car was associated to nothing more than a marketing illustration back then, whereas now automotive art is a genre in itself. What was then nothing but a mere form of advertising has now grown into an actual movement, as artists from all over the world get together regularly at select shows. All those involved in such events consider that cars are a very artistic subject and that they have evolved as an organization far beyond what they had expected, turning car art from painting for advertising into painting for art.

Car art has evolved so much that there are now quite a lot of collectors to whom the automobile is a state of art. And although most artists would be tempted to give a personal touch to their work by painting their own interpretations of the subject, they still keep in mind that the final goal is to please the art collector rather than themselves. And since for most of these automotive art collectors the function of the car still precedes its form, or, in other words, they just want to see the car, the artist’s creative and innovative possibilities are rather limited.

Most of these car artists have a tendency to identify with the genre, but there are some who state that to them automotive art is a form of art like any other, only that their paintings contain cars, instead of flowers, for instance. Still, most of those artists who are now representative for the automotive art have a lot of knowledge about cars, as they didn’t just switch from painting landscapes to painting automobiles. They do it out of passion for this subject. Therefore, we can say that automotive art will exist as long as automobiles do, and it doesn’t seem that their era is fading any time soon.