This year’s event saw what AFAS president Ken Eberts judged to be possibly the group’s strongest exhibit at the Pebble Beach venue so far. With more members than ever before exhibiting at the event and more original pieces being unveiled, the Concours itself celebrated Bugatti and Bentley, Morgan and Audi (which were both celebrating their 100th anniversaries, and the designs of Zagato. Unsurprisingly, an AFAS artist, Barry Rowe, was called upon to provide the official poster for the event. Although they are independent of one another, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance and the Automotive Fine Arts Society really do go well together.

Among the pieces slated to appear is a Robert Burns poetry van as well as numerous other vehicles set to recognize the finest in Scottish poetry and prose. The year of Homecoming has been a major event for all of Scotland, and with the city authorities getting behind the Illuminated Car Parade, it is gratifying to see the movement growing legs – or should that be sprouting wheels – in the United Kingdom. That makes a few art car parades in Britain now – could it be that the movement is finally getting the attention it deserves?

The continued presence of Art Car Fest in the calendars is as good a reason as any to be cheerful. You get the feeling it’s going to take more than a couple of recessions to knock this one off it’s stride, and the final weekend in September will be time again for the California Art Car movement to show us all how it is done. We’ll have more about it after the event, but to find out direct from the people involved about what’s going on, check out their Facebook community at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21581364123.

The Pebble Beach event, held on August 16 last, was this year themed heavily around the Bentley, and saw the first appearance of Bentley’s 2010 Mulsanne model, a car of such refinement that it is almost certain to feature in car art prints almost from the moment it starts rolling off production lines next year. Concours chairman Sandra Button said, on announcing Barry Rowe’s commission to paint this year’s poster, that the finest automobiles were “art on wheels”. The first Mulsanne in production was auctioned at this year’s Concours, and fetched a winning bid of $550,000 – which is not as much as some works of art have managed to pick up, but still a fairly impressive haul nonetheless.

With next year’s Concours d’Elegance to be held on August 15th, the top echelon of car artists will be holding their breath all over again to see if they will get the chance to follow Rowe.

Word is already emerging that the unofficial theme for Burning Man 2010 will be “2012”, which if nothing else is a firm recognition of the whole festival’s forward-thinking nature. With visitor numbers up around 43,000 in a year where financial difficulties have been more severe than in most of our lifetimes, it is a resounding vote of confidence for alternative art and art cars that people are still ready to come and see it in such large numbers. So it should be even better next year when finances should be better and we can all party like it is 2012.

YouTube has become one of the hottest sites on the Internet in the last few years, with just about everyone knowing what the site is about. It is an ideal place to document an art car story, and this is just what many people have decided to do. From footage of completed art cars at the parades and the Burning Man festival among other settings, to videos of the creative process as artists look to document their work from start to finish. Clips of Harrod Blank’s highly-rated Automorphosis movie are also in place, as is a highly touching tribute to Houston Art Car titan Jeff Towns, who tragically died in July.

On his own website (www.tomhalegallery.com) and elsewhere on the web, he is at pains to stress that he feels extremely fortunate to create paintings that he feels are important to him. This is something that will make perfect sense to anyone who has an appreciation of car art. It may be a struggle to create, but the end product makes it all worthwhile. And for as long as Tom Hale is happy to create, we must be happy to look upon his work. His funky, understated yet different style is well worth appreciating.

There is a certain relaxed class and glamor to the work of Tom Fritz. Always keen to depict something classic and beautiful in a way which will be memorable yet, seemingly, somehow effortless, Fritz dips back into his childhood during a period when classic cars were in their pomp and the motorcycle was a bastion of counter-culture mischief. For anyone with an artistic soul and mind, the memories of our childhood will always be a kind of muse when it comes to creating art the way we like to see it.

Tom Fritz has been commissioned by no less than Harley Davidson to create specific, relevant works of art including a piece for their 100th Anniversary in 2001. A job that any motorbike fan would be proud to get, no doubt, but one that Tom certainly earned through his past work.

As well as all of this, Stanley has set up studios in some of the most interesting locations one could think of. From 1985 to 1989 he had his studio on a Dutch barge where he ran workshops on the medium of watercolor with Avril, his wife. In 1991 he moved to his current location, a 14th Century chateau in France’s Merry sur Yonne – where he keeps his collection of classic cars. It would be easy to hate him, until you look at his paintings.