Artist Tony Cairoli drawn to fast cars

DAVID PENHALE FOR THE TORONTO STAR

“I try to put in as much detail as I can. I try to do every nut and bolt,” Tony Cairoli says of his artwork.

Philip Marchand

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Marshall McLuhan noted that yesterday's obsolete technology becomes today's art form.

It should be no surprise, then, that the ink and wash drawing on Tony Cairoli's drafting board, a meticulous rendering of a Ferrari 412 P, strikes the eye as a work of art.

The 412 P is primitive compared to today's Formula One race cars, but this quality of obsolescence makes the car even more beautiful. The depiction looks like a technical drawing – top view, side view – but it is more than that.

"I take it one step further," Cairoli says. "I try to put in as much detail as I can. I try to do every nut and bolt." The result is hypnotic, a dance of intricate lines.

Cairoli has been doing this work for 20 years, spending months on hand drawings of race cars, which are then printed and sold to collectors and car buffs all over the world.

He comes honestly by his passion – his father studied painting and sculpture at London's Saint Martin's College of Art and Design, before immigrating to Canada in 1956, when Tony was a year old.

Cairoli Sr. got a job in Toronto stacking grocery shelves, but impressed his manager by producing artistic signs for the various sections of the store. He ended his career as advertising manager for Savette's, a department store of the time. "I remember overhearing him say, `No child of mine is going to be an artist,'" Cairoli recalls.

In fact, Tony wasn't much interested in art. He had fallen in love with F1 racing cars, the big-wheeled Ferraris and Jaguars and Mercedes driven by legends like Juan Fangio and Sterling Moss.

Cairoli, who lives in Keswick with his wife Mary, took his father's point to the extent that for more than 20 years he has kept his day job – working in the parts department of an electronics company – while pursuing his true vocation.

"I didn't want to lose what I had learned in drafting school so I started drawing things around the house," he recalls. "One of the things I drew was this model of Gilles Villeneuve's 312 T3 which he drove and won his first Grand Prix in Montreal. I just drew it as a design exercise. I shared it with a few people and they sort of liked it, but I didn't know what to do with it. It didn't dawn on me that it was art."

Cairoli was looking through an issue of Autosport magazine one day when he discovered an ad for a "general arrangement" drawing of a race car. "General arrangement" drawings show the relation of parts of a mechanism to each other.

Cairoli decided to go one step further. The key to his art is the wealth of detail, the result of extensive research. His first ambitious drawing was of that same Villeneuve car. Since then he has done 13 more, each one subsequently reproduced in 250 to 500 prints.

"It pays for itself," he says of his drawings which range from $60-$160 in price.

Supported by his day job, he toils away at home in a small atelier cramped with his drawing board, filing cabinets, flat files for his drawings, shelves of books on cars and drivers, drawers for pens, compasses, rulers, measuring tapes and now obsolete drafting tools such as plastic templates used for drawing geometric shapes. "They're tough to find," Cairoli admits.

But at this point he would never give up standing at his drafting board with pen in hand in favour of sitting behind a computer terminal manipulating a mouse. "Young people come up to me and the first thing they say is, `What program do you use?'" Cairoli says.

But there's no computer in his studio. "I love to look at blue prints that other people have done," Cairoli says. "You get to understand them, their style – you know whether the guy is good or not by the way he's drawn them. You can't get that by computer."

By no coincidence, he refuses to draw computer-designed race cars. Aside from aesthetics, these horrendously complex mechanisms are produced by design teams with some 170 members, and may require five engineers just to start. They represent to Cairoli the corruption of the sport he loves. "When the big manufacturers came in, they ruined it," he says. "They took the soul out of it."

Perhaps Cairoli's only regret is that his father died before he could show him the final drawing of Villeneuve's car. In the years after his retirement from Savette's, the elder Cairoli had gone back to painting, experimenting with colour and washes in ways that were the opposite of his son's meticulous realism.

"There was my dad in his pyjamas at six in the morning," Cairoli recalls. "He would be out in the backyard as it started to rain, and he would put this ink drawing on the ground and rain drops would land on it, and he would just watch it and then create something from those drops."

Cairoli uses a metaphor to express the difference between his aesthetic approach and his father's. "He could be walking on the sidewalk and see a crack and think about the interesting shapes he could take from that," Cairoli says. "The difference between me and him is that I would just draw the crack."

Different arts for different artists.

Cairoli looks at the P3 on his drafting board and lovingly traces the lines expressing the car's features. "Cooling ducts," he says. "Roll bars. Engine mounts. Fuelling system. Water systems. Beautiful the way they've done this. It's almost like a spider web."

A spectator could examine this spider web for a long time before exhausting its fine points. "It's something I love," Cairoli says. "It's something I can't give up."

Tony Cairoli's prints can be found at Mini Grid, 608 Mt. Pleasant Rd., Collector's Studio, 136 Yorkville Ave., and DRB Transport Books, 16 Elrose Ave. – or online at automotive-art.com.

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