Car Cutaway Illustrator Jiro Yamada Turned Technical Briefs Into Fine Art - Flashbak

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When you cracked open a car magazine in the 1980s and gasped at a cutaway drawing so detailed you could practically hear the engine purr, you were looking at the work of Jiro Yamada. — gaukmotors

Leonardo da Vinci’s medical cutaway drawings will always be seen as high Renaissance art. But the Italian genius seemed to think of himself as more of a technical illustrator or engineer than a fine artist. Since his time, cutaway illustrators have revealed to us the inner workings of the human body and of every conceivable machine. But any who hoped for Leonardo-like fame would meet with disappointment.

Obscurity awaits the most renowned of technical cutaway artists. Illustrators like Frank Soltesz (ever heard of him? He’s the “King of Cutaway Drawings!”) lend their aesthetic specialization to better-known works by visionaries like Wes Anderson. Whatever their aspirations, the cutaway artist seems doomed to disappear behind their works’ raison d’être.

One of the most admired of automobile cutaway artists, Japanese auto illustrator Jiro Yamada, almost vanished with no explanation from the little public view he occupied among readers of Road & Track and other enthusiast magazines. Yamada died in August of 2025, but the automobile world only just learned of his passing from pancreatic cancer, out of a seeming desire for privacy on the part of his family and perhaps the artist himself.

Yamada seems to have been a retiring character, a sensitive soul in a mechanical discipline. He described his work as “expressing both the rationality and beauty of machines at the same time,” a philosophy he shared with the Italian Renaissance and with his tiny cohort of auto cutaway illustrators, like David Kimble and Jim Hatch, who started when everything was done by hand. As Wheelfront notes:

Yamada started illustrating professionally in 1979… ink on board, airbrush over ink, hours dissolving into days…. Enthusiast publications leaned on him. Private collectors sought him out. If you cracked open the official guidebook for the original Gran Turismo in 1998, his name was in the credits.

Yamada’s website walks visitors through his painstaking process, in which he worked from technical schematics, photography, and a deep understanding of the mechanical relationships between components. All of this could take weeks before he even drew a line. Once Yamada did put pen to paper, each technical drawing he produced became a “masterpiece” of the auto world, according to his small world of admirers.

Will his illustrations ever have more than niche appeal? Art world interest in Yamada’s work suggests as much. The artist entrusted his work to a gallery devoted to the car as art, the Cinquecento Museum in Nagoya Japan, which exists solely to celebrate the adorably stylish Fiat 500. The museum will issue official reproductions of Yamada’s work. It’s a relationship emblematic of the kind of cars Yamada preferred: small, odd, and European, hardly the stuff of today’s muscle car fantasists.

Yamada hardly seemed interested in any kind of fame or attention for himself. He seemed content to devote himself to what fellow cutaway artist Kimble called “the software between my ears,” even after CAD and other forms of computer illustration started to enter the discipline in the mid-80s.

Yamada transitioned to digital in 2000, notes The Drive, yet his work retained its singular spirit. Technical illustrators of the future will never have to render by hand to earn a living. But they can take inspiration from artists like Yamada, who brought Renaissance-level rigor to his digital work, elevating the purely technical to the level of fine art.

via The Drive

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