Wait… who made these rules?

We are taught that art is realism. That spaces are put together with rendering software. Follow the known, traditional rules and you will succeed. No further clarification.

Succeed at… what?

Following the crowd and seeing who manages to stand out in a sea of sameness? Following life’s playbook handed to us by schools?

This newsletter was inspired by BMW. What the heck does BMW have to do with rules? That would have been exactly my question until I visited an exhibition at the BMW Museum in Munich, where the famous Art Cars were on display.

Art Cars are BMWs transformed by world-famous artists such as Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, David Hockney, and many others. Some painted directly onto the cars, while others used different techniques to transfer their artwork onto them.

The idea instantly caught my attention. And as I was brainstorming content ideas around it with my editor, he suddenly asked:

“But why BMW, of all cars? Why did all those artists choose to paint on BMWs? And not Porsche?”

And I was like: BINGO!!

It all started with a racing driver who loved BOTH racing and contemporary art. He had the idea of bringing these two worlds together and brought it to BMW. They said yes. And that’s how artist Alexander Calder created the very first BMW Art Car, which was later raced at Le Mans by that same racing driver.

BMW thought it would be a one-off event. But people LOVED the idea. And that’s how it grew. One Art Car after another. Big artist names. Bold styles. No single artistic formula. Pure expression and imagination.

As I was walking past those cars, I found it fascinating to see just how different the styles and techniques were. Some were expressively painted by hand. Others were precisely transferred onto the surface.

But now we’re getting to the core of this entire story…

It wasn’t the classic canvas many of us would imagine when we hear the word “art.” The canvas became… a CAR.

And if we open our eyes to art in everyday life, we’ll see that it has gone WAY beyond the boundaries we expect.

We see art on café walls.
We see art inside shoe packaging.
We see art on clothes.
We even see art in Emily in Paris - interior sketches that became the starting point for those fabulous spaces.

So the question is…

What realism?
What rules?

SOUL.
CONNECTION.
PEOPLE.

And actually, there’s one more thing I think we can steal from this story:

You don’t always need to wait for brands to come looking for you.

So many artists spend YEARS trying to build the perfect portfolio, hoping that one day the right company will discover it and think: “YES. This is exactly the person we’ve been looking for!”

But the BMW Art Cars started the other way around. Someone had an idea. An idea that came from his own world - his love of contemporary art AND racing.

He brought that idea to BMW. And BMW’s job was simply to say:

YES.

I think there’s something really powerful in that.

We can approach the brands, companies and people we’d LOVE to work with carrying ideas that already belong to us. Ideas shaped by what WE notice, what we love, and how we see the world.

Not: “Hi, here’s my portfolio, please find something for me to do.” 

But:

“I had an idea. And I think you should be part of it.”

You don’t have to sit there waiting to be discovered.

You can be the one who sets the whole thing in motion. 

With big drawing energy,

Anna at @andshedrawsbig