Branson Auto Museum

(...Click the small images in the strip to see the larger image...)

It took decades before I figured out a way to consistently create automotive art in a manor I liked. Oh, I’ve done a work or two over time I was happy with, but I wasn’t able to produce more the way I wanted. The breakthrough came when a buddy unexpectedly asked me to shoot and create photo art of his friend’s 1980 Firebird. I didn’t have the right camera with me, the lighting was bad, and the Firebird’s finish was not great. But somehow, in pushing myself to overcome those problems, I came up with a series of techniques that achieved exactly the outcome I was looking for. (Without getting too deeply into it, among other things, the glass and chrome have to be separated and different effects applied than the body. The effect is less abstract, more refined, even dreamy). Proof again that sometimes it’s the mistakes that lead to the best art.

The irony is that the works displayed in this slide show, captured at the Branson Auto & Farm Museum, came before those Firebird captures. I cranked the Firebird work out quickly for my buddy, but the Branson captures had to wait through my sabbatical and various other distractions before I got around to them, which turned out to be a good thing, because if I hadn’t had the Firebird experience first, I wouldn’t have developed the techniques used here. They’d be lesser works if I’d bothered with them at all.

In a way, automotive art is cheating even more than florals, because the subject is somebody else’s art, somebody else’s design. But if one of art’s objectives is to see the world through a different lens, it’s also taking an industrial object usually taken for granted and fostering a greater appreciation for it. Way more complicated than pickin’ a flower!

​-CH