Artistic Body & Paint

This place rocks. As a female I usually hate to bring my car into mechanics/​auto body/​etc. Often the treatment is less than professional. Both my husband and I have used Artistic several times (I’m a bit fussy about my car, so once was just having them repaint the hood because I had rock dings… they did a great job). Today, I took my brand new car there… I was distraught because I keep my car for a long time (old one has 200K miles) and like to keep it in nice shape. A bird had pooped on my hood and I couldn’t get it shiny again… the spot was kind of crinkly. The owner, Mike, and one of his assistants helped me and the car is good as new. These guys are great… of course, I also love O2 motorsports for car mechanics. It is nice to be in Redding and have super merchants. Thank you Artistic.

I’ve been taking my auto body work to Artistic for 25 years. They have always been very fair and meticulous.

Artistic did a fantastic job on fixing my ride! Although my car was several years old they matched the paint perfectly and I couldn’t tell where the damage had been done to my convertible.
They also were better priced than their competitors!

I’ve always had good luck with Artistic Body and Paint, so when I hit a deer with my wife’s brand new Subaru Forester (4,000 miles on that puppy), I took it to these guys. The hood, windshield, passenger mirror, and all the doors and panels on the passenger side except for the rear panel needed replacing.
The results?
1. The paint didn’t match — it’s extra sparkly, so that half of the car now looks normal and half looks like the guys from «Pimp My Ride» got hold of it.
2. They didn’t properly shoot the paint on the low portions of the doors (you know, where it doesn’t get clean when you wash the car), so there are bald spots.
3. After a week, one of the new plastic fender guards fell off. The others are loose.
This is the sort of thing that often happens with a change of ownership, but to my knowledge the ownership hasn’t turned over. Another possibility is that they lost some of their best guys and the work on my wife’s car was done by neophytes. Still another possibility: After about a dozen years, the paint fumes do their dirty work and the loss of brain cells starts to show in the craftsmanship.
I have a friend who was in the body shop business for a long time, and that last hypothesis has a lot of credibility. The poor guy’s brain was so badly damaged, he had to go into real estate to make a living.
Update: Artistic eventually made it right, but the whole experience was a pain in the ass, so I can’t really give ‘em more than 3 stars. Sorry, boys.