Stefan Johansson

b500 magazine

Racing Driver / Artist / Watch Designer

Stefan Johansson is a Swedish racing driver who had a 10 year career in Formula 1 for both Ferrari and McLaren, among other teams. Since leaving Formula One he has won the 1997 24 Hours of Le Mans and raced in a number of other categories. He lives in Santa Monica, where he is nowadays an accomplished artist, designer entrepreneur and independent thinker. I ’ve been extremely busy here in the studio, painting almost every day and we’re starting to commercialise some of the art, especially the abstract painting. I had no intention of doing that when I started but the style of the art lends itself very well to those types of products.

All those paintings are inspired by my memories of racing on different tracks over the years, the images are something I think of when I think back to racing at a certain track. Every one of the paintings is named after a corner or section of different grand prix circuits.

We started making some face masks based on one of the paintings for fun really but we’re actually selling a lot of them. We’re now doing hats, skateboards, surfboards and a whole range of other clothing items that will be launched gradually over the next 6 months.

And we’re doing prints of the original paintings in three different sizes which have been extremely popular. We’re branding it all around the abstract art. It’s colourful and eye catching. I’m quite chuffed that it’s been so well received.

I enjoy it all but the portraits I do separately are more serious art. There’s quite a lot of effort in terms of the research I do before I even start to paint them as the text I overlay once the subject is painted is really what brings meaning to the work. The whole process is quite time consuming. It takes almost a month to do one portrait. I like all of them for various reasons but I just did one – a “Lucha Libre” portrait of Lewis Hamilton where he’s wearing a Mexican wrestling mask painted in his helmet colours. It’s fun and different and I want to do more of that concept. I just finished one of James Dean and one of Steve McQueen. They’re all meaningful to me and I hope they will cause some level of emotion in my viewers too. I sell all the art on my website and until now the response has been very positive.