Cars are the
last things we
still love

A Mk2 Golf that never quite ran

My dad bought a 1988 Golf off a bloke in Chaddesden for four hundred quid and we spent most of a winter under it. It never really ran. What I remember is not the driving, because there mostly wasn’t any. It’s the shape of the thing on the drive under a streetlight with the bonnet up. Squared off, honest, absolutely certain of itself.

I started drawing it because I wanted a picture of it and there wasn’t one. Every photo I took looked like a photo of a shabby old car. The drawing looked like what the car was actually like. That gap is the entire reason this shop exists.

The first one somebody paid for

A friend’s brother had an E36 he’d owned for eleven years and was about to sell. He asked if I’d draw it before it went. I said yes, charged him thirty pounds, and spent about nineteen hours on it, which, if you do the arithmetic, is not a business.

But he sent me a photo of it framed in his hallway and said something I’ve thought about ever since: “It looks like it did when I liked it most.” Not when it was newest. When he liked it most. A photograph can only ever show you the day you took it. A drawing can show you the car you remember.

Why they’re drawn, not filtered

There is software that will turn a photo of your car into something that looks a bit like an illustration. I’ve tried all of it. It flattens exactly the thing you were trying to keep: the way light sits along a shoulder line, the particular sag of an arch over a wheel that isn’t standard, the fact that your bumper has a scuff and you like it.

So every car here is built the slow way. The body is drawn as separate panels. The shadows are drawn as their own layers, in their own relationship to the base colour. It takes between twenty and forty hours per model and it is the reason the catalogue grows one car at a time instead of a hundred at once.

It is also the reason the builder can work at all. Because the shading was drawn as shading rather than baked into a picture, the paint can change and the light stays where it belongs. A white car still reads as a white car and not a flat cut-out.

Living pieces of art

People talk about cars as objects and I’ve never got on with that. An object sits still. A car has a history in it: the plate you’ve had on three cars running, the colour you chose over the sensible one, the fact you drove it to Scotland in February because you wanted to see if it would.

That is what I’m trying to get on paper. Not a picture of a car. A picture of your car, with your registration on it, in the colour it actually is, at the moment you liked it most. Then it goes on a wall and carries on being looked at long after the car itself has gone somewhere else.