Carl's Car World

 Geo Ham (Georges Hamel, French 1900-1972) one of the great French illustrators and posters artists.   A lifelong aficionado of the automobile, Ham's powers of observation and intuition are seen at their most impressive in the depiction of the Grand Prix of Monaco. One of the most established names in period poster design, his highly individualistic style, so much part of the period, has many followers. 

Tom Hale began his career as an artist at the age of seven when he set his drawing board upon an empty orange crate and began drawing futuristic automobiles. His passion for creating art and drawing cars continued through high school, where he steadily refined his skills. Upon graduating from high school in 1958, Tom joined the U.S. Navy and lived aboard a destroyer for two years. When his tour of duty ended in 1963, Tom enrolled at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Soon after, Tom married his loving wife Micki. Tom's enthusiasm for art and automobiles carried him through college. In 1966, he graduated with honors from the prestigious Art Center College of Design with a degree in transportation design.

In 1966, Tom joined General Motors as a styling designer (his dream come true). After two years at General Motors, Tom spent one year at Chrysler, before moving on to his longtime position of seventeen years at the American Motors Corporation. In 1985, Tom came to the realization that his talent was underutilized and made the decision to leave the auto styling profession to pursue his fine art career on a full-time basis.

Tom's career as an artist has brought him much reward. He has sold more than 3,000 original paintings to clients in the United States and twelve other countries. His work has been commissioned for a total of 65 event posters. Some of Tom's original paintings have been reproduced in limited-edition print. His numerous awards (totaling 362) are punctuated by the Gold Medal of Honor which he received from the American Watercolor Society.

Tom considers every day an opportunity to create his art. His original paintings are shown around the country and at popular automotive events such as Pebble Beach, St. John's, Amelia Island, Auburn and the CCCA. Tom resides in Farmington Hills, Michigan with his wife Fran, where he spends each day painting the fine art of the automobile.

Strother MacMinn, the man who launched a thousand students' styling portfolios, did once design a car himself. It was the 1938 Opel Kapitan, created when MacMinn was in the employ of GM. But his lasting legacy exists in the form of the car that countless students sketched and molded after he left the auto industry for an extended period. MacMinn is likely the most prolific and accomplished teacher of automotive design principles ever. That makes him the most influential designer, even in a once-removed sense, in automotive history.

He was born in Pasadena, California, in 1919, where a row of premium automotive retailers did business, largely with the Hollywood crowd. MacMinn used to pester salespeople in the showrooms for brochures and artwork, as he was already sketching cars when he was barely into his teen years. That led to an opportunity to visit the local Pierce-Arrow dealership, where he had a chance encounter with Franklin Hershey, then chief designer for Murphy, the custom coachbuilder. For the next four years, Hershey critiqued MacMinn's drawings during the young man's summer vacations. When MacMinn graduated from high school in 1936, Harley Earl at GM hired him on the spot, earning him a trip to Germany to design that Opel at a new studio with Hershey in charge.

MacMinn continued on with GM for a short time after World War II, went to Hudson, and was then affiliated with the industrial design firm of Henry Dreyfuss. He'd taken a summer course at the Art Center in Pasadena, and was then hired to its faculty in 1948. His tenure of greatness dates from this point. As an instructor in automotive design, MacMinn remained with the Pasadena college for the next 46 years. His lasting contribution to the school was creation of a curriculum that mirrored a professional design studio, using the latest technologies and processes for creating new cars. That alone set the Art Center apart from other schools. At the school, students learned from MacMinn how to work in clay modeling and proportioning full-size mockups, something many automakers weren't yet doing themselves when designing cars.

 
Homer C. LaGassey Jr., (1924-2014)a prominent figure in both Detroit's automotive design community and in the field of design education, has been named Honored Designer for the 1994 Eyes on Classic Design. LaGassey received an award for lifetime automotive design achievement at the Vision Honored Banquet, held at Cadillac World Headquarters the evening before the 1994 show opened.

LaGassey began his design career at General Motors in 1942, following graduation from Pratt Institute. Working under the legendary Harley Earl, LaGassey was assistant chief designer of the Pontiac and Buick production car studios. At Buick, he contributed to the famous Wildcat II and Wildcat III show cars. In 1955, LaGassey left GM to become chief designer of the Dodge and Suburban studios at Chrysler Corporation.

In 1959, he left Chrysler to form Homer LaGassey Design Consultants. In the next few years, he provided design services for a number of area firms before accepting an executive design position with the Ford Motor Company's Design Center.

At Ford, LaGassey helped design exteriors for the Mustang, Maverick, Falcon, Fairlane, and Thunderbird, and he supervised interior designs for the Lincoln Mark III and Mark IV. He also took the unusual step of designing racing car exteriors, among them the prototype "J Car" designed for the 1967 24 Hours of Le Mans.

LaGassey retired in 1980 and began a teaching career at Detroit's Center for Creative Studies. In 1959, when that institution was called the Society of Arts & Crafts, LaGassey was invited to develop a full-scale automotive design curriculum. Ten years later, the Center's program was attracting worldwide attention. Since its initial accreditation in 1962, more than 400 students have finished the LaGassey-designed four-year program. His graduates have found work at major automakers in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. and at many design and supplier firms.

LaGassey's formula for teaching is to find talent early and aim it quickly toward a professional career. He frequently identified middle-schoolers with potential and offered them instruction that led to design careers.

A Personal Friend of the collector & a former car designer with Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Corporation, Jack Juratovic created automotive fine art for 36 years until his passing in October 2018.

His works appeared in Automobile, Road & Track, AutoWeek magazine, and on the cover of Automobile Quarterly and other magazines. During his life Juratovic undertook innumerable projects for corporate and private commissions including corporate mural work. Some of his poster projects are: the Monterey Historic Races for Alfa Romeo and the Aston Martin Owners Club, the Meadow Brook Historic Races for Lotus, and the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.