MotorsportInPrint – A year in the making
It’s hard to imagine that a hobby of yours could become a business but little over a year ago that’s what happened to Luke Pollard.
For many years he has painted as a hobby, mainly abstract artwork full of colour and texture. These paintings were sold all over the world but it had never thought to combine my love of art and motorsport until one day in March last year he created some digital artwork of a Caterham 7 as a gift. That is where it all began!
Original painting of Tom Onslow-Cole.
Luke said, “The feedback the unique style of digital prints was superb to the point where I thought it would be a good idea to see if the style would work with F1 cars, especially the classics. I searched through the net and dug out some great photos of Stirling Moss, Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart and set about creating some artwork. I had a superb reaction from friends, family and, possibly more importantly, people I didn’t know.”
The next few weeks and months were brilliant for Luke and his motorsport artwork collection grew in size and began to attract the attention from some of the top racing drivers. Luke went on to say that, “…even Tiff Needell has a print of his short career in F1.”
Since then, Luke was contacted by WIngs for Life and the Red Bull Air Race Team, all in the first six months of starting his business. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end.
The turn of the new year saw Luke concentrate more on original paintings and artwork and on his own unique style of painting. “I started work on perfecting my style for these paintings, a style which echoes my original abstract paintings of the past 8 years,” said Luke.
Matt Hamilton and Luke Pollard at Oulton Park.
“I am a believer that artwork doesn’t need to accurately reflect a photograph or the subject and instead should be creative and expressive. I didn’t want to create paintings that were an exact copy of a photo and instead wanted something that was obviously ‘me’ – my own recognisable style.”
Luke has also started to focus on the BTCC, and during the past few months his BTCC artwork has increased in size tenfold. This has encouraged Luke to have more of a presence at each of the meetings and has seen him exhibit and sell his artwork at Rockingham, aswell as create original paintings of Matt Hamilton and Team Aon at Oulton Park and Croft respectively.
Luke is a great advert for proving that hard work and effort pays off and that is reflected in his quality of work. All of Luke’s work can be viewed and purchased at www.motorsportinprint.com. You can also follow Luke on Twitter by clicking this link.
James Mappin
