One of the recurring themes of car art is the thrill of the race. Anyone who has an interest in car art cannot fail to notice the preponderance of racing scenes within the medium. Not every piece of car art depicts a race – it is a far more inclusive medium than that – but there is a popular tendency to depict races. How this is done, and why, tells us a lot about the way people choose their subjects and the way they design a piece of art.

Art, by its very nature, is designed to depict what someone feels is worth showing. Some of the great pieces of art will depict a scene that the artist feels is worth recording and commenting upon – Picasso’s “Guernika” being an example of how this is demonstrated in classical art. For fans of cars, the depiction of a motor race is a good way of bringing together much of what we love about cars – their aesthetic qualities, their mechanical brilliance, and the element of competition that raises people above the mundane.

Depicting a car in motion is in many ways more difficult than still life. You cannot make the paint move about the frame once it has dried. So you need to find a way of creating the impression of speed and movement – something that the best car artists do with ease.