From Inspiration to Creation
People sometimes ask how the pieces get made, so here's an honest look at the process — including the parts that end up in the bin.
It starts with a race. Every piece begins with a real moment — something from that week's racing, or one of the sport's great days that never stops being worth painting. If the moment doesn't have a story in it, it doesn't become a piece.
Then comes the sketching. I work up dozens of studies, exploring how different styles hold the moment — impressionist, pop art, something looser. Modern image tools have joined the sketchbook in this stage, and I use them the way you'd use any study: generate, discard, adjust, discard again. The overwhelming majority never survives this stage.
Refinement is where the work is. The chosen study gets cropped, recomposed and colour-corrected until the eye lands where it should — on the rider, the effort, the moment. This is slow, manual and by far the longest part.
Some pieces lose. Occasionally a piece I've spent days on just doesn't come together. Letting it go is the hardest and most important habit in the whole process.
Finally, the painting. The finished design goes to a professional studio painter I work with, who renders it by hand in oils on canvas. This is the step that turns an image into an object — real brushwork, real texture, paint that catches the light differently every hour of the day.
That's the process — part tradition, part new tools, all in service of the same thing: holding a great racing moment still for the wall.