Garry Hill looked at the newspaper one day 15 years ago and, he says, it changed his life.

Hill still has a copy of The Charlotte Observer, dated May 18, 1987, with a photo on the sports page of three cars running in The Winston at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

It showed cars being driven by Dale Earnhardt and Bill Elliott heading in one direction, with Geoffrey Bodine’s car in between them pointing the other way. Bodine had spun.

Earnhardt went low and Elliott dodged high in one of several controversial moments in that race, the third running of the winners-only event that will be held for the 18th time Saturday night at the track now known as Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

“I looked at that picture and said, ‘That’s a painting,'” Hill said. He had found a way to combine two of his great loves, art and auto racing, by working at an auto art gallery by day, going to races on weekends and working on his paintings by night.

The art gallery in Raleigh, N.C., where he worked handled dozens of fine artists with work based on Formula 1, Indy-car racing, drag racing and street hot rods. There were, however, very few people doing such works on stock-car racing.

Hill called The Observer and negotiated the rights to use the photo in a painting.

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“It was $50,” Hill recalls. “That’s the best $50 I ever spent.”

When Hill finished his painting that fall, he took it back to the Charlotte track and showed it to two officials from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, the company that sponsors The Winston. They were impressed. Hill sold the original to them for $950 and thought he’d done all right for himself.

“We were still living in Raleigh,” Hill recalls. “When we walked out of the RJR suite, my wife, Pam, smiled and said, ‘Well, I guess we can take the family the state fair now.'”

RJR officials liked Hill’s painting so much they asked Hill to do a series of prints. “We didn’t know how many to print or what to charge for them,” Hill said. “Nobody was really doing that kind of thing. We decided to make 500 because, in racing, that just seemed like the right number, and charged $50 for them.”

For Hill, that print marked the real beginning of a career that has allowed him to do much more than take his family to the state fair.

These days, he works from a studio in his home on Lake Norman, near Charlotte, N.C., and is paid as much as $15,000 for works commissioned by his best clients. He has two major series of limited edition prints, “Great Moments in Racing” and “The All-Star Series,” that have been collected by race fans all over the United States and abroad and displayed in museums and at racetracks from Daytona to Indianapolis. Prints from the series on The Winston, for example, are now on display around the balcony at the Speedway Club at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

It’s a great way to make a living, says the 48-year-old from Danville, Va., who grew up in racing.

Hill, as you would expect, has many of his works displayed in his home and studio. One picture displayed prominently there, however, is not one of his originals. It is a small photograph taken in 1956, of Garry, then 3, and his father, Bobby, in front the sign at the Museum of Speed in Daytona Beach, Fla.

As a boy, Garry tagged along with his dad to South Boston Speedway and Bowman-Gray Stadium on the weekends and to Martinsville and Darlington when NASCAR raced there. He toyed with the idea of racing himself, but Bobby Hill steered him toward college and Garry wound up at Averett College in Danville, where he studied art.

His love of art grew, but his passion for racing never waned. When the opportunity finally came he was able to combine the two in a way that has made him one of the premiere artists in his field.

Hill’s work has adorned the covers of dozens of race programs at tracks all around the country. A painting of Jeff Gordon’s victory in the first Brickyard 400 was displayed at the museum at the historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway, quite a thrill for Hill, who describes himself as a “motorhead.”

Every year, when it’s time again for The Winston, Hill goes to the Charlotte track and takes photos of all the cars, paying particular attention to the special paint schemes many teams employ for the all-star event. If he’s going to use a car in a painting, he wants to have the details right. Once, for a painting of a moment from a 1956 race on the old beach course at Daytona, he sought out drivers who’d run there to ask what the gauges on the dash might be reading in a car negotiating the North Turn.

When it comes time to paint, however, Hill rarely works directly from a photograph. He prefers to watch the race from a fan’s perspective.

“The right moment tends to find itself,” Hill says. “The Winston always seems to build like a novel.”

A look at his paintings proves him right. The print from The Winston in 1992 shows Davey Allison’s car turned backward just after taking the checkered flag just ahead of Kyle Petty. You can almost hear the crowd’s deafening roar go to silence as Allison’s Ford crashes.

Hill tries to paint from a perspective no photographer could get. In a print from the Great Moments series depicting Earnhardt’s “Pass in the Grass” in 1987, for example, the view looks directly at the nose of the oncoming cars, as if the artist were standing in the middle of the infield grass like some kind of bullfighter.