Although beautiful landscapes are as close as the front door of his Newbury Park home, Tom Fritz would rather paint automobiles and motorcycles.

"I always loved the smell of grease, oil and gasoline, even the smell of exhaust," Fritz said. "It's life's experiences. I think I was always attracted to cars more than other kids. I guess I was always intrigued by the mechanics."

He remembers being so young his father had to lift him up to see the engine of a '56 Chevy.

"I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and spent a lot of time with my father in the garage," he said.

He went through a progression of two-wheeled vehicles, from mini-bikes through motorcycles, and still has a Honda 750 he got in 1978.

His interest in art started almost as early as his love of motor vehicles.

"I must have been 3 or 4 the first time I used one-point perspective," Fritz said. "It was just a stick figure with a fence, but that was power to me," he said. He would draw wherever he could: on the walls inside the closet, on the door jambs, on the sides of his tennis shoes. His parents bought him a watercolor set when he was about 7, then oil paints, pastels, markers and colored pencils.

Throughout school, he was always the artist in the class, designing the cover of a program, doing things for the teacher, he said.

"As you work your way through school, you notice your art had a certain magic to it," he said, noting that a good illustration on a report might help raise a grade.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in two-dimensional art from CSU Northridge, he went to work in the defense industry for 23 years as a staff artist at Northrop Grumman/Litton Industries, doing freelance commercial illustration on the side.

Eventually Fritz was doing so much freelancing it was like having two full-time jobs, so he decided to just do fine art, he said. He was still painting hot rods in whatever free time he had.

"It was a release," he said. "I was freer, looser," he said. "I was putting my life experience into the content of my work."

In the early '90s he got into a gallery in Detroit and people started taking note of his work.

"I was painting the history of hot rodding in California and the history of motorcycling. I was doing stuff you didn't see in magazines at that time. It was what was happening a generation before me, World War II."

While displaying his work at a Specialty Equipment Market Association show in Las Vegas in the mid-'90s, he met Willy G. Davidson, grandson of one of the founders of Harley-Davidson, who showed interest in his work.

In 1998, the motorcycle company asked him to do four paintings for its annual report. All four editions of prints sold out in a week. He did a painting commemorating the company's 100th anniversary in 2003 and also did portraits of Davidson and retiring chief executive officers.

Fritz describes his work as realistic with a very impressionistic hand. The painting is keyed around the image of the Harley, but people also relate to human beings, so they are an important part of the painting, he said. If he can't find a prop he needs, like an old racing helmet, he will build it.

"I go to extremes for the historical aspect," he said.

"I try to keep to the outside of the color wheel to be as pure as I can. When I want something energized I will go with hotter colors," he said.

"One of the things I dig doing is interpreting the personality of the vehicle with the paint," he said. "I work from a photo reference, but at some point you have to leave the camera behind."

In one painting, two Willys hot rods race in an explosion of aggression. Splashes of color and brush strokes show action.

"That is what art is, a little bit risky, putting them on edge a little bit," Fritz said. "That is when you start playing your jazz music. You try to get everything in the piece that makes it alive."

Fritz has won awards for his work and is a four-time recipient of the Automotive Fine Arts Society Peter Helck Award. He participated in the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance last weekend. His work is in many private and corporate collections, including the corporate office of AAA, General Motors and Ford Motor Company. It can be seen on his Web site: www.fritzart.com.

— To recommend an artist to be profiled in this section, contact Nicole D'Amore at artprofiles@roadrunner.com or 405-0364.