Smallen Artomotive is a side project that I started in 2015. I approach these projects as sculptures. The aesthetic beauty is the primary focus and the mechanical function is the challenge to work around. It must look good and still function as a safe motor vehicle. I might change some of the mechanical functions in the name of aesthetic beauty, or to improve performance, at the cost of loosing features I deem unnecessary, like removing cruse control or windshield wiper fluid for instance.

Prior to 2015 I had never worked on cars and did not know much about them. One day I decided to fix the front bumper panel on my car because it was sagging almost an inch down in the front and looked pathetic. Next thing I knew it was a few months later and I had cleaned, painted, and polished everything under my hood. I had no goal in mind and no reason to do it. I just was mesmerized by the beauty of the metal surface that was left after a little treatment from a wire brush drill attachment. No one ever cleans the engine bay so it gets all nasty over the years. Ironically if you are just driving on regular paved roads it stays very clean for a long time because it is under the cover of the hood and no one is tracking dirt and leaves in from outside.

I was also motivated by the fact that when you open the hood of a modern car, you can barely tell what you are even looking at because of all the hoses and wires and covers and whatever, just jammed into the small space in a seemingly random mess. The old cars are very elegant in their simplicity, even under the hood. Now days when you open the hood of a car there is nothing worth looking at. The engine is the primary part of the car, the main thing that makes it special, but it is lost in the abyss of modern technologies ubiquitous copper wires. My cars engine bay looked like a bowl of charred burnt spaghetti. It was a 5th generation Honda Prelude, not an expensive car, but it was once declared by Car and Driver to be the best handling front wheel drive car ever made. I wanted something to be proud of when I poped the hood. I wanted guys to mean it when they looked at it and said, "oh wow" instead of just saying that because that's what you are supposed to do when someone shows you their engine, even though it is about as exciting as an episode of Lawence Welk without the tap dancing.