ARTS Picturing Great Cars at Italia Bill Weber melds his love for fine cars with his profession as an artist to create oil paintings of classic cars that capture perfectly the majestic design of those vehicles that were, themselves, works of art.

By Don Huntington

The Northern California artist, Bill Weber, is engaged in a number of diverse disciplines as muralist, painter, sculptor, illustrator, architect, holographer, digital artist, modeler, photographer, and curator.

This year Weber was the guest artist at the Italiana Show in Carmel, and displayed and sold his collection of fine oil paintings of classic automobiles. Weber brings a rich background to the task of depicting these great cars.

Bill Weber has had a love affair with autos his whole life and for him fine cars represent an exciting merging of form and function - of art with power. He believes that the 30s were the golden age of car design. "The Duesenbergs were ultimate art on wheels," he said. Every Duesenberg was a unique work of art, even though all of them retained the distinctive Duesenberg design. Weber also loved the fact that Duesenbergs were powered by powerful Lycoming airplane engines. Duel overhead cams with four valves per cylinder increased the horsepower to an amazing 265, which made it more powerful than ten Model A Fords.

"They were gigantic two-seater versions of a sports car," Bill said. "They were as marvelous as they were impractical!"

Bill has stayed in touch with fine cars throughout his life beginning with an MG TD that his mom bought before Bill reached his teens. "She still owns that car," Bill says.

When he was 16 Weber bought a 1957 XK-140 Jaguar Roadster with a custom C-head engine - the same power plant that had won at La Mons for several years in a row. The engine was guaranteed to do 141 miles an hour. "The speedometer was broken but one day I buried the tachometer," Bill says. "I don't know if I was doing 141 miles an hour, but I was flying!"

The car came to a bad end when Weber drove it off a small cliff while drag racing on a San Mateo Bridge access road. It was a dark night, he recalls, and the car seemed to be only mildly damaged.

"I used a match to check for damage under the back. My final thought before the car blew up was, 'This smells liked gas.' It was!"

Bill then bought a four-year-old 1963 MGB, which was followed in a few years by a 1958 Alpha-Romero Spider. In 1984 Weber paid $26,000 for a 1956 Ford T-Bird show car that was in perfect condition.

Weber began going to Pebble Beach every year and taking photos of classic cars. "I began to meld my love for classic cars with my profession as an artist and made a coloring book from classic cars that I drew," he said.

In 1994 he began selling his coloring book and original oil paintings of classic cars beginning with an automobile show in San Jose. Last year he was at the San Jose Grand Prix.

The Muralist
There are many facets to Weber's art. His largest project is the giant Jazz Mural at 606 Broadway in San Francisco. The mural prominently features Benny Goodman playing on his clarinet and Teddy Wilson playing his piano. It also depicts San Francisco figures from the past and present including legends like Herb Caen, Emperor Norton, and a line-up of the City's former mayors stretching back to Alioto, who was mayor in the 1960s.

One of Benny Goodman's daughters wrote powerfully about Weber's picture of her father:

"I'm always stunned at the likeness Bill created. Without question it is one of the best portraits done, an uncanny resemblance.... I always look up from my steering wheel and say a quick hello to Daddy when I pass by."

The Jazz Mural is four stories high and more than 100 feet long. The location at the intersection of Broadway and Columbus Street is significant because it marks the point where Chinatown, North Beach, and the old Barbary Coast sections of the City come together. Elements in the mural depict the history of the three areas - showing, for example, a Chinese dragon and a scene of the Barbary Coast from the 1930s.

Bill first painted the Jazz Mural in 1987. Two decades of fog, pollution, and sunshine marred the work and faded the colors so three years ago he began a restoration project that is nearing completion. He incorporated some updates in the mural, adding Willy Brown, Gene Kruppa, and Gavin Newsom, for example.

Weber recently created another large mural for the Antelope Storage Unit in the Sacramento area. The 300-foot front wall of the unit now depicts characters from the old Little Rascals movies. Various scenes humorously depict Spanky, Buckwheat, Darla, Porky, Stymie, Alfalfa, and Pete the Pup engaged in releasing antelopes from storage units where they had presumably been held captive. Besides the obvious public examples of his work, Weber's murals adorn the walls of many private homes. If a homeowner wishes the wall of a large dining room to give the effect of looking from the window of a Tuscan villa or to provide the illusion of being on a street facing an English Pub, Weber will paint the scene in vivid colors and with high realism.

He is able to develop any theme the homeowner wishes. One elderly woman commissioned him to paint a large mural in the family estate depicting all of her grandchildren playing together in an outdoor scene.

Fine Artist, Sculptor, Architect, Curator
Weber reserves his greatest love for his fine art. Painting under the brush name of El Gallo, which is Spanish for "the rooster," he creates vivid and fantastic pictures of creatures and scenes that spring from his fervid imagination.

Weber says that several of his paintings have brought him special satisfaction. One of his most curious paintings depicts the head of Albert Einstein. All over and around the scene people from diverse walks of life including soldiers, lawyers, doctors, and poets, are intently examining Einstein's mind, ostensibly seeking knowledge for understanding the universe and dealing with questions that humans have been asking since the dawn of time.

Another hat Weber wears is that of premier architect. He is currently involved in several building projects. The most ambitious is a combination winery and estate home for the Azzulina Vineyard Estate in Livermore. He is designing the winery to incorporate a tasting room and reception hall. The 16,000 square foot building includes a 6,000 square foot wine cellar.

An 8,000 square foot estate home will be located 130 feet from the winery. The two buildings are situated on a 20-acre vineyard. Bill's highly detailed plans are laid out on 50 pages of 30- by 40-inch drawings - all of them perfectly drawn and done by hand.

He built scale models for both buildings, took pictures of the area and the models, and then Photo-shopped the buildings into the scene so that the client could see exactly what the project would look like when completed before the first footings were poured. Weber was also curator of the Blackhawk Art Gallery and helps manage the art gallery located in the Beat Museum that opened last summer in San Francisco.

An Amazing Family Legacy
Bill is a remarkable scion from an extraordinary family tree. Two centuries ago his forebears, the Peraltas, were the first Spanish settlers in the area. The family patriarch, Don LuÌs MarÌa Peralta, was a general in the Spanish Army. Until 1784 he was stationed at the presidio in Monterey. He helped protect missionaries including Father Junipero Serra.

As a reward, instead of money, Peralta was granted all the land encompassing the current towns of San Leandro, Oakland, Alameda, Emeryville, Piedmont, Berkeley, and Albany. He built a huge hacienda the size of a city block, including two large homes, 20 guesthouses, and a private church. The main structure is still on the site and is being used as a museum.

Weber's maternal grandmother was a maid for William Randolph Hearst in the 1920s. Her dad was a wood-carver for projects in the Hearst castle. He restored the castle's famous dining room table and made chairs to match the ancient chairs that had been imported from Europe. He also carved the fireplace mantle.

Weber's paternal grandmother married into the Peraltas; her husband's name was Orvalle Lucky. Orvalle's dad worked for Wells Fargo and was robbed by the famous highwayman, Black Bart.

Weber's dad was a pilot in WW II who "flew the Hump" in China bringing supplies to the Flying Tigers, and later piloting bombers over the African and German theaters. Following the war he was the personal pilot for General Douglas MacArthur in Japan. That's where Bill was born.

Weber's dad died in 1989 but flying remained a part of his family, because following a lifetime of taking lessons, his mom got her license when she was 65 and continued flying into her 80s. She still lives beside the runway of Pine Mountain Lake and would come and go from the huge 35- by 100-foot hanger in her backyard, which Weber designed for her, complete with an apartment/guesthouse and a woodshop for his stepfather who was a dilettante carpenter.

Brother Bob became the head of the LA SWAT organization and was captain of the team that ended the career of Patti Hearst's kidnapper by the straight-forward way of burning down the building where he had taken refuge. Bill's brother subsequently helped design the Kevlar bullet-proof vest and is now VP for Safari Body Armor.

Weber says that his objective in all parts of his art consists of striving towards transcendence. He believes that all creative efforts can be judged by the standard of whether or not it lends itself to a vision of human life that soars above the mundane gray world of mere unreflective existence.

Weber believes humankind to be the proper goal and measure of an artist's work and feels that he's painting something worthwhile only to the extent that it glorifies mankind's existence in some worthy manner. He shares da Vinci's embrace of life and holds great regard for any work of creation that elevates the humanity we share with each other.

The essence of artistry for Weber is to create things that have never been seen before on earth. He believes that there is a magic quality about real art because it always involves bringing into existence some object or presentation that has at its source the imagination of the artist. Such activity forms the basis for Weber's meaning of life.

"I try to create something new and hopefully wonderful that has never before been seen on our tired, worn planet. Doing that always feels right to me! There is a vitality about it! Life at that point really does become more than making a living. I'll always be passionate about this!"

And this year he was back as the guest artist at the Italiana Show in Carmel.
Learn more about Weber's art at http://www.billwebermuralist.com/