After a 10 year stint as a jobbing artist in the 1980’s followed by a long career creating props, scenery and vehicles for top video games companies and film studios, Simon Britnell decided to return to being a painter and was in the perfect position to envisage a new and interesting way to represent his chosen subject matter - the iconic lines of  significant 1970’s automobiles that he grew up with.

Influenced by the way the impressionists used the broken colour technique Britnell developed a style that combined his fine, detailed illustrative work with a more “artistic” quality. Building up layers with different colours on the canvas in a way that allows previous layers to remain visible. Applying colours to the painting in small strokes, but not physically blending them, so that they blend optically rather than literally.

The composition of Britnell’s paintings for which he is now recognised was a serendipitous development. “When I was first working on compositions I had a group of older canvases I wanted to use standing in the corner of my studio. They were the wrong dimensions really for what I had planned - side profiles. After some consideration I experimented with introducing a ghosted front profile into the top of the canvas and found that this balanced the layout rather nicely.”