Keny · Automotive paintings

I paint cars that won't leave me alone.

Not every car. Not on demand. A particular machine gets into my head and stays there until it is two metres wide and hanging on a wall. Each painting is a one-off. There are no prints, no editions, and no second versions.

McLaren P1, one-off acrylic painting by Keny, framed
McLaren P1, 2026. Acrylic, 100 × 150 cm. Bound for Chrome Temple, Sydney. After a photograph by Automotive Artisans. Painted because I could not stop thinking about it, which is the only reason I paint anything.
Where it started

A long time ago there was a wardrobe door covered in Porsches: the ones I could afford at the time, cut out of magazines and stuck up with tape. I had a dream, the way boys with posters do. It took a few decades, but I ended up owning every car on that door.

The painting never stopped. What I understood then and still believe now is that these machines are the great sculpture of our age. Some of them deserve to be witnessed slowly, in paint, by hand, at a scale that stops a room.

A young Lee Powell beside the wardrobe door covered in Porsche posters
The wardrobe door, original edition.
Why I paint

I paint three things. Cars that will not leave me alone. Faces, now and then, when a whole life is written in one and I want to try to read it out loud. And abstracts, when I am looking for words I do not have yet. Some of those words end up becoming books.

I ran my other businesses with my head. This runs on something older. The studio is the quietest room in my life, and I keep it that way.

The P1, and why it got painted. Filmed in the St Kilda studio.
The name

Keny was named by my kids. Their ruling: Lee is the software one. Thirty years of it, an Oxford masters, two companies founded and sold, a writing app used by over a million people. Useful, they agreed, but he talks about AI at dinner and it makes you yawn. Keny is the fun one. So Keny got the brushes, and Lee was told to stop helping.

They were more right than they knew. After enough years of ticking boxes, the studio is where I remembered what the boxes were for. It is where I paint, and it is where I wrote ManOS and the books that came after it: the tools I wish someone had handed me sooner. Besides, say it out loud: "it's a Keny." It has a ring to it. Nobody has ever pointed at a wall and said that about software.

Selected work
Porsche 911 Carrera RS, painting by Keny
Porsche 911 Carrera RS. The car that was on the bedroom wall first.
I Have a Dream, red Ferrari painting by Keny
"I Have a Dream." A boy, a window, a red Ferrari. Donated to charity, where it was bought by the wife of a man who had just taken delivery of a Singer 911. He has promised me a look at it sometime. There is now a calendar reminder titled Singer. It repeats until sometime becomes a date.
Bentley Continental painting handed over at Bentley Melbourne
Bentley Continental. Given to Frank at Bentley Melbourne after a wonderful drive day. Word on the street is it has since migrated upstairs to Bobby Zagame's office, which I am choosing to read as a five-star review.
Keny with his cat beside her portrait
And sometimes the client is the cat. She's crazy. The painting is accurate.
How a commission happens
Keny sketching a Porsche onto canvas, reference photograph in hand
Where every painting starts: a pencil, a big white canvas, and one photograph worth staring at for a very long time.
  1. 01 · Tell me the story. Email me about the car, with a photo or two. But mostly, tell me what I am really painting. What the car means to you and how it came into your life. Where the painting is going to hang, because the room changes everything: scale, light, mood, all of it. And what a great result looks like in your eyes, because I want to know what we are aiming at before I pick up a pencil.
  2. 02 · I decide whether it gets under my skin. I say yes to a handful of cars a year, and I say no kindly. If your car is one I can't put down, you'll know quickly.
  3. 03 · We talk. Concepts, scale, medium, setting. Some works are a metre square. Some take over an entire wall. The room tells us.
  4. 04 · I paint it. In my St Kilda studio, and I keep you across the work as it develops. Good paintings are not fast, and I will give you an honest timeline before we begin.
  5. 05 · I deliver it personally. Anywhere in Australia. Partly to see it hung right. Mostly because I like meeting the people who end up living with these paintings. More than a few of them have stayed in my life, and that is the best part of the whole thing. You are also welcome at the studio.
The particulars

Commissions begin at $7,500, which is typically a work around a metre square. Larger works, and murals, are quoted on scope.

Every painting is a one-off original, signed Keny. No prints, no reproductions, not at any price. I never repeat a work, and I never paint the same car twice.

A few detours

None of what follows is for sale. It is just the reason the rest of it exists: a couple of cars I should never have let go, a neighbour I went round to shout at, a painting I gave away, and one whiteboard.

Lee Powell sitting on the bonnet of a dark blue Jaguar C-type on a French road
The C-type, somewhere in France. My best mate Aidan built this car, and then the two of us drove it from the UK to Monza for the Grand Prix, and afterwards drove it all the way home again. Everything on it worked except for two things. The exhaust came off its bracket only occasionally, and never once in private. It waited for an audience: a bit of theatrical revving, or better still a restaurant with outdoor seating, so an entire terrace could watch two chaps in caps, goggles and fake pipes swearing with real feeling and burning their hands on the bolts trying to put it back on. The speedometer never worked at all, so I genuinely have no idea how fast we went down the autobahns. Probably for the best. There was no roof. The only luggage space was a small metal floor pan between my legs, one side of which the exhaust heated to the point where it would burn you straight through the metal. Sixteen blokes, sixteen ridiculous cars, the whole way there and the whole way back. One of the best memories I have.
A young Lee Powell crouched beside his red Porsche 911 SC
The first car I ever paid cash for. An all original 911 SC. I sold it a few years later with thirty thousand kilometres on the clock, for fifty per cent more than I paid, and it seemed like a very sensible decision at the time. It was not. Around the same period a 993 Turbo was a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and my son Harrison told me we should buy one. I explained to him, with great authority, that I was not paying a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for a car that was already over a decade old. Wrong about that one too. So for investment advice on cars, speak to Harrison, whose record on this is considerably better than mine. Better yet, speak to an actual expert: Lex Pederson at Chrome Temple. Under no circumstances speak to me.
Lee Powell and his neighbour Roy beside a red Ferrari Testarossa in a Melbourne laneway
My neighbour, Roy. For a while I was the man who was going to complain about the noise. Someone in the lane kept firing up something enormous at all the wrong hours, and it was not even the Ferrari. It was his SLS Mercedes, which quite literally shook our house every time he started it. So round I went to say something about it. Then I saw what was making the noise, and what was parked next to it, and what was parked next to that. The complaint died somewhere in my throat. I had been a Ferrari virgin up to that morning, so when he asked whether I would like a run in the Testarossa, I did not need asking twice. I smiled for about a week. What surprised me most is how comfortable the thing is, and how beautiful it is up close. You could eat your dinner off any part of that engine bay, and the inside is something else again. We have been friends ever since, and the noise has never come up.
Lee Powell in the studio beside Lady in Waiting, a portrait of a woman in a pale headscarf looking upward
Lady in Waiting. I gave this one to a charity, and it was bought by a young man I had never met. That is where I learned what giving something away unconditionally actually does, which is nothing you can predict and everything you did not expect. I have made more beautiful connections through the paintings I gave away than through most of the ones I sold.
A race car and a young onlooker drawn on a whiteboard in marker pen in under two minutes
Two minutes, whiteboard markers. A challenge from friends: draw a car, and a young bloke looking in at it, in under two minutes, using nothing but the fat markers you write on the board with. This is what came out. If the idea looks familiar, it is the same one as "I Have a Dream" further up this page. Some pictures keep asking to be drawn until you let them.
The writing

The rest of what I make is words. Books, mostly, about rebuilding a life the way an engineer rebuilds a failing system, written from inside the work rather than after it.

The newest project is ManOS. Not another book. A working room for men at the same point in life as me, on the question I am working on myself: who am I becoming. If that sounds like your decade, the door is open.

Start

Tell me about your car.

lee@leepowell.com

One email is enough. Worst case, we have a good chat about a great car. Best case, it ends up two metres wide on your wall.

There is more of my work on Instagram, the faces and the abstracts among it, in between the books.