One for the road

Artistic canvases come in many forms – but the sweeping planes of a Bentley might be one of the more wildly rarefied. Such is the way with a new collaboration between the prestige motoring company and the British architectural artist Stephen Wiltshire MBE. 

For ‘Belonging Bentayga’, Wiltshire visited the marque’s Crewe factory, embellishing the surface of a Bentayga Hybrid SUV in situ, reconstituting each side of the car as a different continent and using his outstanding illustration skills to fill each with city skylines and landmarks from around the globe. 

Even more impressive than the beautifully intricate images is how they were formulated. Wiltshire is an autistic savant who was mute as a child, communicating his feelings via his nascent artist talents, and segueing from animals to buses to buildings as he got older. “My love for architecture and different designs of buildings helps us, as people, to connect,” the artist explains. “Building is part of our lives: it forms our homes, schools, places of work, museums.”

Now, he is able to recreate an image in precise detail after seeing it only once: in this case, the vertiginous skylines of Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Dubai and Manhattan; architectural icons like Rome’s Trevi Fountain, Vatican City and Colosseum; the Gherkin, St Paul’s, Tate Modern, Battersea Power Station and Nelson’s Column in London; Cologne Cathedral, Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona and many more – 29 in all – as well as myriad drawings of people of different nationalities the world over. “These cities were places I had visited over the years during my travels,” explains Wiltshire of the locales chosen. “We agreed that it would be a great idea to portray that.” 

After the Bentayga was sanded back to the bare paint by the Crewe factory’s craftspeople, Wiltshire set to it with his paint pens over two days, plugging into a cool jazz soundtrack on his AirPods and relaying his memories to the car’s surfaces, before signing the veneer panel on the dashboard. The vehicle was dried and lacquered and lo: the piece was complete. The design has since been repurposed as a wrap for five other Bentaygas (“Stunt cars!” laughs Bruce), deployed across global markets. 

It’s a truly eye-catching work, both superficially pristine and indicative of the wider community values and inclusivity ambitions at Bentley –  a workforce comprising people from 52 countries, selling across 60 markets – under its Beyond100 initiative, which supports technical sustainability, eco initiatives and self-expression.

Announced in 2020 and inaugurated in 2021, the strategy saw an earlier artistic initiative, helmed by British sculptor, design and painter Rich Morris: the ‘Unifying Spur’, a Bentley Flying Spur model decorated with every colour in the Progress flag (AKA the Pride rainbow, plus white, brown, pink and white) and kinetically connecting the phrase ‘Love is Love’ through a single line, in solidarity with minority communities across race, creed and sexuality.