Kirsten Williamson
Kirsten Williamson was already a talented artist when she happened upon a James Bond exhibition in London in 2014, as she strolled through the exhibit looking over film memorabilia, props, posters, and costumes she saw an original screen-used 007 Aston Martin DB5.
Seeing a DB5 up close will stop almost anyone in their tracks, but for Kirsten it changed the direction of her life. She decided she’d draw a 1:1 scale life-sized version of the car so she could forever park it in her living room.
The idea progressed to wanting to draw a car owned by a real person with a real story. Her personal style is influenced by the films, music, and culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s. With arguably more style icons than any other time period; Steve McQueen, Le Mans, the drivers of Formula 1, and the Rat Pack all became solid favourites.
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Kirsten Williamson’s Supercar Garage
Frank Sinatra’s 1969 Lamborghini Miura became the inspiration for her first piece. The Sinatra piece was so large that she went to a hardware store and bought a 7 foot wide section of plywood to use as a base – it took 5 months of pencils, paper and lots of coffee, drawing full time, to achieve a level of detail that she was happy with.
Over the years since she first saw the DB5, Kirsten has devoted thousands of hours to painstakingly creating her immersive pieces, each featuring an iconic car or a borderline sacred piece of motoring history – like James Hunt’s Formula 1 helmet.
Kirsten’s approach to drawing is clean and mechanical, as if the car is being viewed in a white-walled museum environment to ensure that nothing interferes with the vision of the car. She aspires to show that a car is as individual as its owner: the unique details, scratches and markings are what makes a particular car belong to someone. To her, that’s where the story is and what she immortalises on paper – so that it can be enjoyed in any space or place as large as life.
A 1:1 drawing can take up to 4 months, however she also produces work at smaller scales. For the first time Kirsten is offering limited edition prints of her work, she launched the new series this week (today at the time of writing), meaning it’s now affordable to own a piece of her art that took months to create, for orders of magnitude less than it would cost otherwise.
Each of Kirsten’s limited edition prints is produced by a specialist art house on 320 gsm fine art cotton paper, they can be ordered at either full scale or half scale, with the life-size Miura piece measuring in at a giant 2 meters (6′ 6″) wide by 1.13 meters (3′ 8″) high at full scale, or 1 meter by .6 of a meter at half scale. Each print is shipped rolled up in a hard tube for safety, and they each include a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Photography by Nathan Duff of Retromotive Magazine
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
