Vanquish

The story behind Vanquish

An Aston Martin Vanquish parked in a Houston car park, the city’s skyline filling the background — it was a double-page spread in an imported copy of Autocar, and it was going to become a painting. The pages were quietly removed from the library’s copy and taken home. Autocar was around ten dollars an issue in Australia at the time, shipped by airfreight from the UK — not something to be buying on a tight budget just for a reference image. The rest, as they say, is history.

The source image presented two immediate problems. The double-page spread had to be scanned in two halves, joined digitally, and the magazine text removed before work could begin. Then came the drawing — the Houston skyline alone took over 150 hours to render accurately. Buildings of that complexity, with their grids of windows, their reflections, their varying materials and angles, are as demanding as anything in photorealism. Once the drawing was complete, the painting itself was comparatively straightforward. Total time: 579 hours.

This painting is a deliberate homage to Richard Estes, the American painter widely regarded as the preeminent figure in photorealism. Estes made the urban environment — glass, steel, reflective surfaces, the geometry of cities — his territory. Placing an Aston Martin Vanquish, then newly released as Ford’s flagship model for the marque, into that tradition felt right. The car is itself a design landmark, and the pairing of object and backdrop demanded exactly the kind of sustained technical precision that defines the genre at its best.

When this painting was finished, something had shifted. The accumulated skill of years of work had arrived at a point where any photograph, given sufficient time and effort, was paintable to the highest standard. That knowledge, once earned, does not leave.

Source image of realism painting Vanquish

Detail views of realism painting Vanquish