Octane Magazine, Summer 2024 - Lyn Hiner

I was featured in the Summer 2024 issue of Octane Magazine Japan. Read a pdf version here. English translation below:

Interview with LYN HINER
Cars on Canvas

Words by Taichi Fujino | Photography by Ken Takayanagi

There Are No Borders in Cars or Art

Without sketching on a blank white canvas, she layers acrylic paint again and again with a palette knife. From a dark-colored background, a vividly colored car seems to emerge and leap into view. Artist Lyn Hiner, whose work is expanding from North America to Europe and beyond, has made her first visit to Japan. Why does she paint cars?

Profile

LYN HINER
Lyn Hiner studied art at Pratt Institute in New York. After that, she spent about ten years in the auto racing industry as a trade show manager. In 2012, after experiencing a serious injury, she decided to return to the world of art, a passion she had loved since her youth. In 2017, she began creating paintings with cars as her subject, and her distinctive works quickly drew attention. In 2024, Lyn Hiner Studios Japan was established, making her work available for purchase online within Japan.

https://lynhiner.jp/

Story

In one corner of the Automobile Council venue held this past April, a special gallery had been prepared, displaying vivid, three-dimensional, weighty paintings of cars that immediately caught the eye. The works on display were by American artist Lyn Hiner, shown in Japan for the first time. Among them, many Porsche works stood out.

"I have loved drawing since I was a child, and I went to art school in New York. At the same time, because of my father, who raced a Porsche 911, I came to love cars - especially Porsche. After graduating, I worked for about ten years at a company that organized racing events, then stepped away from work for a while after getting married and having children. But in 2012, I suffered a major injury, and that changed my outlook on life. I decided I wanted to paint again."

Lyn looks back on that moment as a revelation from God. Until then, she had painted in a realistic style, but her work began to shift toward something more abstract and passionate. At the time, she was creating works with flowers as her subject.

"One day, one of my collectors - who knew I was a 'Porsche girl' - asked if I would paint his beloved car for his office. By coincidence, his car was a Porsche 911."

That became the catalyst for her to begin painting cars. Her reputation spread by word of mouth, and in 2017 she was invited to exhibit at the SEMA Show.

"I was told I needed at least six works for the show, but with only a few months left, I had only three pieces at the time. The final painting went into the transport vehicle before the paint had even fully dried. My work has an impressionistic quality, and I do not think people fully understood what I was painting - what techniques I was using or what feelings I was putting into it. Even so, for some reason, I remember many people taking photographs of the work."

A few years later at SEMA, a Japanese visitor was deeply struck by one of her paintings. He stopped for a long time, left the booth once, but could not get the work out of his mind. In the end, he purchased several pieces. Wanting to bring her work to a wider audience in Japan, he suddenly proposed becoming her sales representative. For Lyn, who had never been to Japan and had never sold work specifically for the Japanese market, it was a bolt from the blue.

"I thought, 'Are you serious?'" she says with a laugh. "But when I talked with him, there was a real connection. He understood the emotion in the work. I decided to try it."

The backgrounds of Lyn's paintings are often dark in tone, including black. They express the pain, sadness, and complexity of life that she experienced through her injury. In contrast, the three-dimensional forms of the cars seem to rise out of that darkness, somehow evoking fireworks. They are expressions of love, passion, and positive emotion.

Her work is available in three stages: original paintings; giclees, in which acrylic paint is applied over prints based on the originals; and final prints. Each is produced only in limited numbers. Naturally, the one-of-one original paintings are the most valuable and expensive, but at the Automobile Council venue, several works - including originals - had already sold by the first day.

In June, Lyn plans to expand her activities in Japan further, including an exhibition event at Porsche Center Hachioji and an initiative through the private-sales department of a department store to find owners who would like to commission paintings of their own cars.

Finally, we asked Lyn for a message to collectors in Japan.

"I love cars, and I love art. My work is proof of my love for cars. When someone purchases one of my paintings, they are not only owning a work of art - they are sharing in the feeling behind it."

Indeed, art transcends borders.

Additional Notes from the Article

Each year, Lyn creates five works as a collection for that year. Her car-related works are broadly divided into two categories: Petrol and Emblems. The source images vary widely, from photographs she personally takes after seeing an owner's actual car to thousands of reference images provided with the cooperation of museums. The deciding factor for composition is "what looks beautiful to me," she says.

There is no pencil sketch or preliminary drawing. Using a palette knife, Lyn applies acrylic paint in many layers. The first layer may be the base color, the second the background, the third the body form, and so on; at times, a work may contain as many as ten layers. Depending on the piece, she may also use materials such as 24-karat gold or platinum.

Because of her father's influence, many of her works feature Porsche, but she also paints a wide range of brands in response to client requests, including Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Aston Martin.

One work based on her father's Porsche is "Greta - 1964 Porsche 911 'Euro'" (1). One of Lyn's own favorite works is "Buffy - 2019 Porsche GT3 Cup MR" (2). She said she was thrilled because the finished piece turned out even better than she had imagined.

Photo caption: With her manager and husband, Rob.