Image by Pawel Litwinski, courtesy Gooding & Company The automobiles of Auburn, Indiana, drew a coterie of flamboyant buyers, but few of them went so far over the top as George Whittell Jr., who inherited two gigantic California fortunes that underpinned his life as a rake and adventurer. George loved cars. He especially loved the […]

Claims of survivor automobiles can often be debunked by the tell-tale trail of an orbital sander, or yellowed plastic interior bits that belie the like-new condition of the exterior paint. Worse yet is a glaring tin-pot head of a modern grade zero hardware store bolt holding on a fender. Not so with this 460-cubic-inch V-8-powered […]

Back in the salad days of the Nineties dot-com boom, we eked out a living painting sets for television and movies. Tasks included making many new things look old, which included building a ship set inside a restored WWII-vintage Liberty ship. Why? Glossy new stuff looks phony on film, because glossy new stuff does not […]