The first time Alex Staidle sold a drawing, he thought somebody had lost it. It was an art show in town, and he fully expected to take everything home and leave it in a closet until he was dead and someone threw it away. Instead there was a blank spot on the wall. "I actually went up to the lady and I'm like, I don't see my piece," he said. "And they're like, oh, no, someone bought it. And the words didn't land." Somebody bought a second one at the same show. He figured that was an accident too.
It wasn't, and now his newest drawing is headed to Las Vegas. It's the #14 TDS Racing Oreca LMP2 that Shopify founder Tobi Lütke drove in his debut at the 24 Hours of Le Mans this June, the car with Petrolicious on its livery. Alex drew it as a one-off with Petrolicious to commemorate that race, and it's on a special edition of The Petrolicious Post available at the Shopify booth at the SEMA Show, November 3 through 6.
He only started drawing three or four years ago. Before that there was mechanical engineering school, air traffic control in the military, and eventually a healthcare job in Gualala on the Mendocino coast, which by his count makes this his third career. "I feel like I'm several different people all at once," he said, "and who exactly is in the driver's seat varies." He didn't have a shop until he was almost 40, he used to organize and co-drive rallies, and these days there are bills and a job. Drawing is how he does more with cars without being out in the driveway until 2 a.m.
He tried painting first and it didn't take. He wanted the minutiae and paint wouldn't give it to him, so he went to pen and ink and taught himself off the internet. His first cars were atrocious, his word. Then he started penciling in the three-box structure and a couple of landmarks before the ink went down, and the cars got better. He could chase every seam and dent into hyperrealism, but at a certain point, he figures, you should just take a photo. He'd rather the car have character. "Someone looks at a car," he said, "you should be able to look at it and be like, I know exactly what car this is, maybe what year it is."
A small drawing can take him four hours and a big one up to fifty, and none of them happen in one sitting. The black line goes down first, in ink. Color comes last and goes in quick, with markers. For a long time he only did black and white, until his wife told him to do full color. Everything gets run through a good scanner at the end. There's no vector images here. It's physical art that exists because of an intense expenditure of time.
Which makes a Le Mans prototype a strange subject for him. He likes older, boxier cars with seams and lines. Newer ones are hard, he said, because everything flows. The Shopify car's digital camo he built the way he figured he could, out of small squares, every one laid in by hand. He had about 10 days to do it, most of them already spoken for by the day job. "I am not a fast artist," he said.
His own store runs on Shopify, which he picked after doing his own research. "The last time I made a website, it was HTML 4," he said. He wanted something that worked so he could get back to drawing. Petrolicious is a Shopify store too, and it uses Shopify Collective to find artists like him and put their work in front of its readers. He calls it a co-op. "Petrolicious, of course, is going to have a lot more reach than Alex from Gualala," he said. Somebody who sees one of his drawings in the Post can go buy it.
There's no ruler on his desk and no measuring tape. When one thing on the page has to match the size of another, he scales it off a post-it with two ink dots on it and freehands the rest, and the lines stay where they land. "I try not to measure things," he's said. "I kind of just feel it out." Come November the real one sits in that booth in Vegas, a car where every surface was measured by somebody, probably more than once, and his is a little off here and there and looks right anyway.
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