Some artists get a s-l-o-w start, explains Wallace Wyss (rhymes with “Reese") Back in 1962 he enrolled in art classes at Wayne State in Detroit but when an ad agency hired interns a year later he snapped up a job as copywriter.

Flash forward several decades, Wyss is taking his 16th car book to the Beverly Hills car show so he decides to make a painting of  Shelby, featured in the book (a previous one on Shelby sold 50,000 copies) . At the show, he sold the book and showed the buyer a picture of the painting. The buyer said "Go get it--you sold that too."

But it took years of experimenting with paint (he decided on acrylics) and a style (still painting on various styles of paper before he begins to make a final painting  of a car). 

A one-time member of the Ferrari Owners Club (he bought  a ratty Ferrari from a movie producer) he specializes in Italian cars.

Wyss' love of Ferraris is quite evident in his work.

Bizzarrini, a little known flash in the pan, is his favorite-- because he first glimpsed one in 1968 in Detroit and coincidentally is going to make another portrait of it more than a half century later.

Still a photojournalist, he annually treks to Monterey for Car Week where he has a booth with his wife Angelita, selling his books (now all out of print) and his paper prints and giclee canvases.

Since some of the shows he attends as a journalist have prewar cars, an offshoot subject is art deco, or streamline moderne, cars, "That was my second oil sale," he recalls, "--a Delahaye--for the owner of the Mullin Museum, a museum devoted entirely to prewar French cars… He has an offshoot category of those cars."

He used to shoot pictures at racing events like the Monterey Historics but schlepping cameras and long lenses around became too much, now he just goes to car events with two or three point-and-shoot cameras, trying to remember to crouch so the cars don't look too high from his 6-foot frame.

His method of approaching a painting is to carefully enlarge his favorite picture from each event up to 11" x 17" and use carbon paper to transfer the skeletal outline to the painting surface. Then once he does a rough, he prints it on one kind of paper, then corrects it, prints it on another type of paper, taking sometimes five or six runs. All the paper is from Kelly and his favorite is "linen" which actually looks like linen cloth. Then if he has a paper print he really likes is selected for a giclee print, gallery wrapped (canvas wrapped around the wood frame). His favorite giclee size is 20" x 30" but he can be persuaded to go larger. He then embellishes. "To some artists an embellishment is a dab here or there--with me it's painting the whole picture again atop the print."

Only on the cases of commissions is he persuaded to change the background. "One guy with a Jag XK120 wanted Wimbledon stadium in the background because his daughter competed there," he said "then there's been requests for castles and mountains."

Though he seldom has people in his work he's trying to wean away from static cars-on-a-lawn narratives. “Cars are about people," he says. He plans to include more people in his compositions in the future.

The car show route has become stagnant for him lately, but in August 2022, he came upon a stroke of luck after consigning two giclees of Ferraris to Mecum at Monterey as road art. "I had thought road art was gasoline globes, or kiddies pedal cars. And I thought their audience was muscle cars compared to tonier operations like RM Sothebys or Gooding. But they accepted them and the  day I delivered my work, I saw they had Ferraris and Lamborghinis too,"

His Ferrari engine  portrait sold for $900 and his portrait of a '60s Ferrari race car for over $1000. "I was blown away--who would have thought there were Ferrari fans at the Mecum?" He consigned them at no reserve. "It was nail biting because a bidder could buy it at one dollar," but I'm glad I took the chance."

If you are interested or want to see more of Wallace Wyss' work he can be reached at Malibucarart@gmail.com.

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