Simple yet distinctive

“I went to art college years ago, and ended up working in the interior design industry,” recalls Freire. “I enjoyed doing that for many years, but I always wanted to go back to screen-printing, because I loved it so much when I was at college.”

So Freire bit the bullet and decided to retrain… “I got my studio at Wimbledon Art Studios about four years ago now, and sort of haven’t stopped since,” she says. Having always been passionate about cars (her grandfather raced Bugattis at Brooklands in the 1930s), it was a pleasant turn of events when her work started to feature them more and more. “I try to keep them really simple, and let the cars speak for themselves,” she says. The process – involving photography and the extensive layering of colours on the computer – is long, especially the experimentation with silver inks to get the highlighting of the chrome details just right, but we think the simple yet distinctive prints are more than worth it.

Photos: Ella Freire