TERRY ROSS MOTORSPORT ART
Motorsport-related art usually plays it safe. Terry Ross’s radical sculptures are among the rare exceptions
We meet the London-based artist who’s creating motorsport sculptures with a difference, and take a look at his latest work
‘THIS IS ART WITH A STORY TO TELL. BUT IT NEVER TAKES ITSELF TOO SERIOUSLY’
TERRY ROSS DOESN’T DO WORTHY OIL PAINTINGS OF Stirling Moss driving a classic Aston Martin or Ferrari at Goodwood. ‘Everyone does those, and if I can’t do something original, then I don’t want to do it at all,’ he says. So Terry’s art is art with attitude and a poke in the eye for the traditionalists. If it were a car, it would be doing doughnuts on the Duke of Richmond’s front lawn.
His signature sculptures are instantly arresting, the forms, the compositions and the colours a joyful assault on your eyeballs. But look more closely and there’s just as much joy – and humour, and poignancy – in the tiniest details. One of his sculptures shows pre-war British ace Dick Seaman (no tittering at the back) arm-wrestling his mighty Mercedes W125. Look closely and you’ll see the tyre-tracks are made up of hundreds of miniature swastikas.
When you spot them it’s slightly shocking, but then if you know your motor racing history you’ll know that the Mercedes and Auto Union teams of the 1930s were indeed backed by the Nazis. Although, according to Terry, modernday Mercedes high-ups were not amused when the piece was displayed at the Festival of Speed… ‘Everyone from Mercedes came piling in,’ he relates. ‘They were shuffling around a bit and didn’t look very happy, but there wasn’t much they could do about it!’
His art is often about telling a story and challenging the viewer, but humour is important, too. When he produced a sculpture of James Hunt’s title-winning Mclaren, the trails from the wheels were slivers of mid-70s beer cans, Marlboro cigarette packets and clippings from era-correct Playboy and Penthouse mags. ‘I loved all that “Sex: breakfast of champions” stuff,’ says Terry.
‘It was a series of three. One of them was bought as a birthday present for a chap, but when he got it he didn’t like the saucy bits. So I reluctantly agreed to change it. But then I thought “Sod it”, and I did one for myself and it was a complete collage of tits and bums and booze and fags, just outrageous. And I took it to Goodwood and the guy’s brother-in-law bought it, I think to wind him up.’
Many pieces capture a precise moment in time – the exploding rear tyre on the Belgian-entered Ferrari 250 LM that cost its crew victory in the 1965 24 Hours of Le Mans; the moment Jo Siffert missed a gear at 225mph at 2am on the Mulsanne in the Gulf-liveried 917K in 1970 and blew the engine to smithereens. Much of Terry’s art captures artistry at the wheel, too – Jim Clark holding his Lotus in a perfect drift; Gilles Villeneuve catching the tail of his Ferrari with an instinctive flick of the wrists…
This is art with a story to tell. But it never takes itself too seriously, and when you meet the guy who created it, you understand why. He’s Terence Ross on his business cards and on his website, speed-still.com – ‘but everyone calls me Terry, in fact my mum used to call me Tel’, he laughs as he welcomes us to his home studio in his native south London on a sunny June day.
He’s a proper car guy. Owned and spannered hot-rods and American musclecars in the ’70s and ’80s, once dropped a 350 Chevy V8 into a TR6, ‘because it had to be done!’. These days he’s mellowed, a little – his garage is home to a brace of immaculate M3s – E30 Evo 2 and AC Schnitzer E46. ‘The toys’ as he calls them. In the front garden, in a Carcoon, is a 1965 two-door GT Cortina that he’s owned for 35 years, though he’s considering selling it because he doesn’t do so much spannering himself these days and it doesn’t get the regular exercise it needs.
As a young man, Terry fancied a career designing cars, so after studying graphic design at uni he managed to get onto the MA automotive design course at the RCA. ‘I was there for eight weeks!’ he laughs. ‘I’d spent the whole eight weeks drawing door handles. Meanwhile a couple of friends had gone into advertising and when I’d meet them for a drink they were clearly having a lot more fun!’
So he quit the design course for advertising and stayed in it for 20 years, rising to creative director for a major agency, working with the likes of Bailey, employing a young Charles Settrington (now better known as the Duke of Richmond) as a photographer, and drinking espressos in Charles Saatchi’s kitchen.
‘Anyway, I got the wrong side of 40 – or maybe it was the right side – and thought “What the hell am I doing?” And I thought about starting a car magazine, one that would have been very much picture-led – this was about 20 years ago, long before
‘IF I COULDN’T DO IT HOW I WANTED TO DO IT, THEN I WOULDN’T DO IT AT ALL’ – TERRY ROSS
The Road Rat – and it was going to be called Marque and I’d planned the content for six issues. But when I showed it to the distributors they said “You can’t do that”, because I was designing covers without cover lines. And if I couldn’t do it how I wanted to do it, then I wouldn’t do it at all. Meanwhile I’d started playing around with clay…’
Remember Speed Freaks? Model cars as caricatures, chunkily sculpted with cartoonishly shortened and widened bodywork and impossibly distended alloys? Speed Freaks was Terry’s first venture into sculpting cars and it was a massive success, tens of thousands sold all round the globe. And then after about seven years he knocked it on the head – for a variety of reasons but mostly because he was losing control of the way they were produced – and considered his next move.
‘It’s a cliché to say I followed my dreams, but I wondered: “What would happen if I started doing big stuff?” So I did the Rossi piece [the multiple Motogp champion hanging off his Repsol Honda, previous pages], and that got me into the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, and I realised I could do “art” art.
‘I wouldn’t be where I am today without Speed Freaks,’ he notes. But the pieces he produces today – under the Speed/still banner – are on another level, made in much smaller runs of three, four or five examples, with much more hand finishing. They’re ‘proper’ works of art, combining sculpting and painting. But they’re still terrific fun, with a thrilling sense of movement and energy. Pressed for influences, Terry sites the French photographer Lartigue, whose iconic panning shot of an early racing car, distorted by the lens he was using so that the wheels appear elliptical and forward-leaning, has a similar feel of speed captured in a moment.
‘I’d describe my stuff as more graphic than realistic – that’s down to my background as an art director – but they have to have a level of authenticity. The people who buy them are petrolheads first; the art appreciation comes second.’
So how does the creative process work? ‘First comes the idea, often from something I’ve read, then usually a sketch or two. Then I’ll do a maquette – a sculpture in miniature to see if it works – then I go big. It normally takes me 4-6 weeks to sculpt each model, using the wonderfully named Super Sculpey polymer clay, which is soft like plasticine. Then I stick it into the oven to harden, and that creates the master. Next I take it to a guy who creates the casts – normally not more than half a dozen – which are marble resin, and then the paint starts to go on. Each one I paint is unique, whether it’s the colours, or sometimes the numbers on the cars – whatever it is, no two pieces are the same.’
Particularly tricky shapes might be cast in several parts and then pinned together with brass pins. The backing boards are MDF with beefy brackets and the finished pieces are wall-mounted by being slotted onto screws. The price for a typical piece is around four grand, with shipping costs on top. ‘Which can be a lot,’ Terry admits, ‘but you really can’t cut corners there.’
He can count a number of big names among his customers. A new study of Rossi will be going to the man himself. ‘The Villeneuve piece, I ended up selling two of the three that I sold to other Formula 1 drivers, which kind of reinforces the point that everyone thought he was good, not just us mere mortals.’
He produces prints and huge back-lit images too, but the sculptures are still the bulk of his output and the pieces for which he’s best known. He usually shows a selection of his latest work at the Festival of Speed, but this year he has decided to open his home studio for private viewings by appointment from July 4-17.
Current works in progress include a triptych based on the Ferrari 330 P4 that came second at Le Mans in 1967. ‘The idea is three versions of the car on three separate backgrounds representing three stages of the race – 8pm Saturday, midnight and 8am Sunday.’ Meanwhile he’s reading about Fangio’s road-racing exploits in saloon cars in his native South America in the days before he came to Europe. ‘The lunacy of it! People were dying like it was a war – he was killing his codrivers like you wouldn’t believe and he had so many lucky escapes himself.
‘So that’s in the background, but then I think “Fangio, no. Everyone does Fangio”. And I don’t want to go down the same road as everybody else…’ Knowing Terry, somehow I doubt there’s any danger of that!