With the advent of recent technologies, automotive manufacturers have just started experimenting with vibrant colors on new cars. But their color selections pale next to Jane Gottlieb's, who has 11 million shades and hues to choose from when painting her automobiles.

No, Gottlieb doesn't work at the local Earl Scheib paint and body shop; she uses her computer to generate the pinks, magentas, lime greens and other colors that coat the body panels of the cars in her photographs. Her style is instantly recognizable, and is uniquely her own.

How did she create this style? The process Gottlieb first used consisted of hand-painting her photographs with dyes. "When the emulsion gets wet it's like a sponge, so you can kind of push the color into it. Each layer makes the photo less realistic." The problem with this process, according to Gottlieb, was that it was extremely time consuming. Each coat of dye had to dry and be cleaned then painted again. It was a good idea, but a painstaking process, until she discovered the wonderful world of computer graphics.

"The computer is great. I used to paint with five colors; now I have 11 million. I can sit there and figure every different way in the world to work the photo. The freedom to create compared to the restrictions before is unbelievable. This new technique allows me to combine and change and create at different levels that I couldn't do before. I just keep discovering what you can do with it [the computer]."

But she didn't start out with the intention or becoming a computer artist. Gottlieb grew up in Southern California, and became involved in art through her parents. "My father and mother were both artistic," she says. "My mother painted in oils, but my father was the one who really introduced me to art. He loved art. We used to go to the museums together. I remember one show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966. I was 10 years old, and there was a Van Gogh retrospective. I remember it being so incredible. They did it all chronologically. It was my father who gave us the education. That introduction [to the world of art] was significant, but my mother would take me with her to her painting classes. I'd get some cardboard and my mother would give me some oils to use. I got a lot of attention there. The teacher would say how free I was with my art. Those were the days of abstract expressionism.

Gottlieb's first taste of success came when she was fairly young. "My first show was at UES [University Elementary School, on the UCLA campus] in 6th grade. I can see the whole thing. l remember walking down the main hallway and seeing my art on the wall and how great it felt. That was the first time I really got an appreciation for art."

She continued her education in painting into the '60s, but realized everything was changing. "Pop art, Andy Warhol, everything was changing in the '60s, and I was really just becoming an abstract expressionist." That's when she switched to photography as a secondary form of artistic expression, and she had found it a much easier way than painting to capture images. "I was working with and learning from photographers and had always taken photos. I had done extensive traveling in Europe, and painting while traveling was ridiculous to do. Painting had changed, too, which was part of the reason that got me out of it. That's why photography was perfect for me, and at the perfect time."

Although she photographs a lot of architecture and garden scenes, one of her all-time favorite subjects is automobiles. "The cars I developed a taste for were funky, smashed up cars because there was this sense of humor to them. Then I started to see cars and their personalities, and that's how it started. Each car wasn't beautiful. I took a lot of photos of masked-up cars, cars that were twisted but still on the road, cars with vines growing out of them. When I was in Europe I shot strange, little funny cars. I'd shoot the Ferraris in Italy, but I'd also shoot the Cinquecentos or three wheelers."

What generated her enthusiast's interest in cars? "I've always loved cars, being from Los Angeles, which was a real car culture town,', remembers Gottlieb. "My father loved cars and had some very interesting ones while I was growing up. He bought a black Jaguar XKE convertible. It was the first one in L.A. Some guy brought it over [from Europe] and couldn't make the payments. That was 1968, and I was 14. That car was so gorgeous. You couldn't park it anywhere, you couldn't stop anywhere without someone wanting to know what it was. I think that really affected me. Then he had an Aston Martin DB5. What a car-Steve McQueen had the same car. My father wasn't really a sports-car driver, he just had lots of great cars for a couple of years there, and they really set me off."

Gottlieb's father's influence carried over to her own preference for automobiles. "I always liked sports cars, but it was a different era then. You could put the top down and didn't have to worry about being carjacked. My first car was a [Nash] Metropolitan; it was the cutest little thing in the world. I loved that car. I think I bought it for $350 and sold it for $350! My first real car when I came back from New York was a Fiat ] 24 sports car. I really wanted a Ferrari, but got the 124, which also was designed by Pininfarina; it was a smaller version of the Ferrari Dino, and much cheaper. I think it cost me about $3000. That was the first really exciting car I owned. I've never really had the finances to buy cars, so unfortunately, I don't have a great collection to talk about-not yet."

Developing her unique artistic style began gradually. "I started retouching my pictures beginning with the garden scenes, which were already colorful to begin with. I started tweaking them to make it look as if I had found a great garden at the perfect time. Then I started to make the sky images turquoise. I tried all sorts of things. Sometimes I'd go back and really saturate it with color. I thought about my abstract expressionalistic style and started making each one [photo] less realistic and more outside the lines. With these unrealistic skies and unrealistic colors, I felt I had come full circle with my art, still using all that artification and now all those years of composition and vision. Then I realized I had a lot of photographs I had taken around the world that had no color in them. I never printed them because they were taken on gray days; it was all gray. T never really did anything with them until this. I found that they were perfect to paint. I started making a name for myself, and became different from other photographers when I started this retouching and painting."

Gottlieb feels fortunate that her love of photography has helped her create her own style. "I'm just so happy I got into this, and now I have 25 years of photographs-a lifetime of photos-to work with," she states.

Using the computer to create was such a break through for Gottlieb, she hungered for more knowledge of how to use her new tool. She decided to attend the Kodak School of Creative Imaging in Maine, where she learned the intricacies of working with the computer graphics software. "I was the only one working on the computer [at the school], and I loved it. It took me months to buy my own system and find the right kits to help me do what I wanted. I then took over 500 of my favorite photos and had them digitized. I'd take the photos and remove backgrounds or maybe add flowers, and spend a lot of time working on the colors. I'd take all the yellows and change them to orange, then play with the color balance of the six basic colors, switching back and forth, playing with the shadows, midtones, and highlights. I can sit here for hours and hours; I lose all sense of time."

When asked about the popularity of her automotive artwork, Gottlieb admits it's because of America's love affair with the car. "My cars have been so successful because they're accessible images and they're romantic. They have this twofold thing. They touch everybody's memories; everyone has memories of cars, and cars are these parallel images."

Success with her original photo/art style has resulted in two popular books, "Garden Tales" and "Car Tales,'7 which showcase her work in a smaller format, accompanied by short written pieces by a variety of the masters of literature.

And when plans for the Petersen Automotive Museum were announced, Gottlieb felt her artwork would fit perfectly into the museum's theme. "I sent the museum my work, but by the time it got back to me, I already was working on the computer, so I told them I'd like to put the hand-painted car pieces in, but also include 15 pieces on the computer where I combined old shots of L.A. I took over the years with the cars as a tribute to the idyllic L.A. that some of us remember." Many of Gottlieb's photos include classic L.A. architecture like the Pan Pacific Auditorium, Tiny Naylor's restaurant and the Hollywood Bowling Alley, all landmarks that now are gone.

And when it comes to classic architecture, Gottlieb's house (which she shares with her husband David Obst) definitely fits in that category. Driving down the quiet residential street on the west side of Los Angeles, just one glance at the pink, purple, and lime-green shades of paint that festoon the facade of her two-story custom home will tell you an artist with amazing vision lives there. And the house is purely an extension of the artist; Gottlieb has surrounded herself with color-in her home, in her attire, and throughout her work.

When asked what she'd like people to take away from her art, Gottlieb wants them to get more visual. "I want them to appreciate color and add more of it to their lives. When people see my art they start buying more color. They've even told me they were inspired to buy a brightly colored jacket after seeing my house and my art. There's enough bad in the world. It's much nicer to make life more colorful. "

And in a clearly understated way, Jane Gottlieb reminds us, "You may have noticed, I have this thing for color."

Visit Jane Gottlieb's "Joy Ride" display at the Petersen Automotive Museum, 6060 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA; 213/930-2277. Museum hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 10-6; closed Mondays. Admission: $7 adults, $5 seniors and students, $3 kids 5-12, kids 5 and under free.