Artists at the Concours

TWO VERY DIFFERENT BUT EQUALLY REVERED NAMES WILL BE THIS YEAR’S FEATURED ARTISTS: ANNA-LOUISE FELSTEAD AND RICHARD NEERGAARD OF RN CAR ART

Two automotive artists, Anna-Louise Felstead and Richard Neergaard of RN Car Art, will be at the London Concours this year, exhibiting their very different and distinctive styles.

Anna-Louise Felstead often paints on location in ink on paper, using these studies as reference material for larger oil paintings. Her passion for mechanical objects led to a trip to Monaco during the Grand Prix Historique in 2008, where she painted her first-ever race car, and she’s never looked back.

Since then, her work has been featured in numerous motoring magazines.

Internationally known for painting Historic and modern racing cars, she continues to travel the world attending race and concours events such as Pebble Beach, Amelia Island, Villa d’Este and Le Mans.

A collection of her paintings was first exhibited at the Le Mans Museum in 2012, and then in a solo show at the Royal

BASES HIS UNUSUAL ARTWORKS AROUND PARTS FROM RACE CARS AND SUPERCARS

BELOW LEFT ANNALOUISE PAINTS IN INK ON LOCATION, TO THEN CREATE LARGER OIL PAINTINGS

Automobile Club in 2017. This will be her first time exhibiting at the London Concours.

Richard Neergaard grew up attending Formula 1 races during the 1960s. Now a full-time artist, he uses parts from race cars and supercars to base his artworks around. He then creates aluminium panels that are laser cut, CNC bent and anodised. Then a high-quality photo is laminated and cut to fit exactly on the panels, before being screwed into an acrylic gloss back panel.

He has works in the British Motor Museum, LA’s Automobile Driving Museum, and Jaguar Heritage Trust and Williams F1 museums, plus the Alfa Romeo F1, McLaren F1 and Williams F1 HQs, and has exhibited at the RAC and Sotheby’s in London.

One surprising fact is that Richard is also the inventor of the globally successful Finish PowerBall dishwasher tablet…

To find out more, please visit www.alfelstead.com and www.rncarart.com.

There’s a new addition to the London Concours this year – podcast duo Smith and Sniff, who will be entertaining visitors with live podcasts from the Concours on the Wednesday and Thursday evenings (ticket only, Prince Consort Room).

Smith and Sniff comprises long-time friends and car journalists Jonny Smith and Richard Porter. On a 2011 junket to the Pebble Beach Concours, they filmed themselves driving a borrowed golf buggy, which sparked the idea to film themselves in a vehicle of some kind, talking the sort of “idle rubbish” they’d talk about even if there weren’t cameras on them.

In 2016 Jonny and Richard got around to doing this on a regular basis for the Smith and Sniff YouTube channel... until Covid spoiled their fun. Fortunately, they’d already worked out how to record audio remotely, and from this they started the Smith and Sniff podcast, which is now Britain’s number one car podcast.

Jonny started his automotive career on a VW magazine before moving on to Max Power, which led to an extraordinary series of improbable adventures. He went on to work at Car magazine, before becoming a presenter on Fifth Gear. He’s now the face and brain of the popular and eclectic YouTube channel The Late Brake Show.

Richard got a lucky break working on TopGear in the late 1990s, then went off to do “some other things”, got made redundant and made use of his time setting up the satirical car website sniffpetrol.com, hence the Sniff nickname. He subsequently became the script editor on the 2002-2015 iteration of TopGear, winner of the 2005 Emmy Award for best unscripted show. He’s now a script writer and editor for various TV shows, a contributor to several magazines and newspapers, and the author of more than 25 books including the BoringCarTrivia series.