What is it about the medium of painting and illustration that communicates to us and keeps it relevant, even in a world of digital photography?
A few years ago, I was invited to give a talk to an ad agency. Some photographers came up to me afterwards and said, “We used to try to copy your stuff in photographs” I said wait a minute, (laughing) I thought artists copy photographs!
For over twenty years, our advertising campaigns at Pontiac were always above the competitive average according to the ratings. In 1968, our ads were the only art in magazines for automobile advertising. Every other campaign was done in photography. In that year we completely clobbered them. Our ratings were way above all of the other automobile ads. Where the photography all had the same look, I could name a dozen different artists on various car accounts over the years, and each one had a different style.
More recently I have been giving lectures to art schools and automobile design studios. I talked to Nissan and Mercedes. The equipment they have now is mind-blowing. They can design a car on the computer, create an armature, put a skin on it, and they can “photo” the car in any view you can think of without actually having to build the car. But I noticed a few years back that car ads had started to look the same, all of the computer renditions looked alike. If anyone were to come along now and do an ad the way we did back then, it would stick out like a sore thumb (in a good way).
As an artist, I understand the influence an environment can have on creativity. It seems like Pontiac Division was not only forward thinking in allowing its engineers room to innovate, but they left you a lot of creative freedom to do the same, How did this affect your work?
Well, It’s interesting the way you put it. When I started doing work for General Motors I was doing four or five car campaigns at the same time. I still managed to make them all look different; Nash, Buick, Kaiser, Cadillac.
Kaiser was my first big departure in getting to do what I wanted to do. When they asked me to handle their campaign I said I was too busy. Well, they came back and said “Mr. Kaiser insists you do his campaign, what will it take?” I took a couple of days and came back with my demands which I thought would probably turn them off. I doubled my price and said I wanted to be able to sign the pictures, which was unusual in advertising. And I wanted creative freedom to do the cars the way I wanted. They bought all of that. Well, once you establish that, everybody else goes along with it.
This happened again, when I was working on Buick. They asked for another ad and I said I couldn’t do it because I was too busy. They bought an ad someplace else and brought it up to Flint. The general manager looked at it and said “Fitz didn’t do this, did he?” When they told him no, he said, “see if we can sign him up to work for us exclusively” Well, I had already done an exclusive thing with Mercury and I didn’t want to do that anymore. But I didn’t want to say no to this guy, who was on a fast-track to becoming president of General Motors, so I made my demands “a little bit above the norm”, figuring they wouldn’t do it. Well, they came right back and said “Come on in and sign the contract”.
The point is, from that day on for the next twenty-one years, I never had anything turned down. I no longer worked from their layouts. The only instruction I took from them was what car to render, GTO, Bonneville, Firebird, etc.
Your style is defined by some unique and bold innovations. You chose uncommon visual perspectives, sometimes actually truncating the front of the car. In one ad, you drove a full-color car image over the gutter onto a black and white page. You also did the unthinkable to car enthusiasts and ad executives alike: You put the cars in the rain and dumped snow on top of them. Did you raise any eyebrows for rendering the cars like this?
I did one ad for Buick that the sales manager didn’t like. It was a black Roadmaster underneath the canopy of The Beverly Hills Hotel. I reflected the green and white stripes of the canopy on this black car. I thought it was great. He didn’t buy it. It was the only one that was rejected in over four hundred ads and 21 years.
But for Pontiac, our marching orders were to raise the image of the car, make it socially acceptable. So I did things that would have been unthinkable ten years before, like putting a girl on a bicycle in front of the car, covering up half of it. They loved it! At the time, you couldn’t find a Pontiac in a yacht club or golf club parking lot anywhere. Just a year later, you could find them everywhere. That was the point.
Was there something special about the design of the cars that guided your art?
The Pontiac front end was the greatest thing they ever did. It was so different and distinctive, it allowed me to push the visual to the limits, and I was making seven-eighth front views instead of seven-eighth side views, the old standard. That enlarged the image of the car to 60 percent of the page. The side view only took fifteen percent of the page, which was costing hundreds of thousands of dollars by the way.
By pushing the front view and surrounding the car with people involved in all these wonderful activities, yachting, golf, tennis, the car became a part of that life and activity. Did you know, out of 285 Pontiac ads, there is only one that has anyone actually looking at the car? This was deliberate. No one is directly interacting with it. That was the revolutionary part.
I knew an artist working on the Mercury account at that time and he was told by the client to “copy the Pontiac stuff”, but they never did quite figure out what it was we were doing. To me it was so simple.
I did a ‘58 Cadillac for GM’s 50th Anniversary Book. There is no building or background visible, no people in evening clothes and fine jewelry, just the doorman and the car, and that tells you all you need to know about that car.
You painted the cars and Van Kaufman rendered the people and scenery in the compositions. Yet the finished product always looked so seamless. They tell a story the viewer wants to enter into, which is one of the reasons they were so popular. Tell us about your unique relationship with Van and how you developed these visual stories.
I hired Van while working on the Mercury account. I remembered he had done work on a previous account that I thought was interesting and different. We worked together and were friends and travelling companions for the next 25 years or so. When travelled to find locations, we would each go individually. Each would come back with about 500 slides. We would sort through those, get together, and cull those down to a few dozen or so, and go from there. We eventually just evolved into our style.
I remember when we had reached a point, we actually did one Pontiac ad over the telephone! Color, composition, everything. I did the car and it fit on Van’s background perfectly. We were that much in tune with each other.
You got quite a few Pontiac loaner cars, and purchased two. What were your most memorable rides out of the bunch?
I had twelve company cars a year, three at a time. That’s three new cars every 90 days. I never formed a sentimental attachment to any one car, they came and went so quickly. There were some I thought were the best looking, but I never fell in love with any particular model.
Which ones did you think were the best looking?
I think the ‘67 Pontiacs were some of best looking cars ever built. The modeling and sculpting of the sheet metal was a combination of subtle curves and sharp lines that was so distinctive. The look of the front bumpers into the fenders. Nothing else had ever looked like that. They were absolutely distinguished.
Also, the ‘69 and ‘70 Grand Prix. The way the roof blended into the fender was just great. It was all based on the European sports car look with a long hood and short deck.
Tell me about your work on the Cars Movie
That was great. The director, John Lasseter is a great guy. They had already started work on the movie when they brought me in. At Pixar they have everything broken down into specialties. They have one guy who does nothing but fabric, the way it wrinkles, light and shadow etc. Amazing.
The day I came in, they were trying to figure the correct rendering for the headlights. They were reflecting the sky in the upper part of the headlight and the bottom half was dark, reflecting the bumper. I pointed out that a headlight is concave, so it reverses the reflection. These are really bright guys, but that never dawned on them (laughs). But it was a great experience.
You laid down your brush for a few years and went into real estate.
I have done a lot of things. I actually started out as a car designer (Note: Art Fitzpatrick helped design bodies for Packard Motor Car at the fresh age of twenty). After GM I created displays, exhibits, architecture. I have remodeled houses. When I wasn’t doing ads I was designing and building homes. I was doing photography and art direction, even writing copy. So I was still doing my thing. But I did miss the community of artists in Fairfield County after I moved out to California.
Out of all your ads, did you have any personal favorites?
I have a few. I did one of a green ‘69 GTO convertible. It’s near a cove, and there’s a diver with a mask, you can just see his head. That’s me! (laughs). That is the most popular one, though I don’t know why.
Another is a ‘67 Catalina in the moonlight, with a couple out on a raft. An all-time favorite of mine is a ‘60 Catalina with a man in a harlequin suit. The confetti is caught on a wiper blade and makes a nice reflection across the hood.
Were there other artistic influences in your life that helped you to define your style?
My father was an artist. My grandfather was a world-famous architect, engineer, inventor, artist; an all-around renaissance man. I grew up around it and it never occurred to me to do anything else. I call it “Designer Genes” If you are an artist you do it. But I like to think of myself as a pace-setter, I always did my own thing. I know nobody did automobile ads like mine before.
Note: Art Fizpatrick is 94 years young and hard at work. Recently his artwork was commissioned by Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. He is still, as he puts it, “as busy as a one-armed paper-hanger”.
