Jason Mattox is a 36-year-old pinstriper who sometimes works under the name Timebomb Kustoms. The walls of his family home in New Albany are covered with framed photographs. Descending into his basement feels like walking from a hall of memories into a museum of deranged pop culture where you’re just as likely to find paintings of winged eyeballs as anything else. There is something to look at in every direction, whether it is stacks of magazines, metal tool boxes covered in metallic paint, or collections of some other strange item.
Mattox comes across as humble and hardworking, but he’s also savvy, like someone who takes every opportunity to make his employment fantasies come true.
As he talks, he moves brightly painted panels around the room, holding them up to talk about each one. Some of them are still drying. The rest he’s busy packing up for a trip to Texas, where he will attend a conference with thousands of attendees.
One interesting piece is a board with a small paint can stuck to it, tilted to its side.
“That’s like the fourth or fifth one of those I’ve done,” said Mattox. “I just needed something – I was like, what am I going to do with all these old paint cans? I screw them to the boards and make them look like the paint has spilled out.”
This approach to solving seemingly simple problems in creative ways makes Mattox fun to talk to, although it’s not always easy to follow him when he enters an in-depth description of something he knows a lot about. He readily admits that he lives in his own world and doesn’t pay much attention to anything outside of it.
Mattox’s paint brushes are the tools of his trade. And he knows all about his trade.
“Those are the ones I stripe with,” said Mattox, opening a box of wet, black paint brushes. “Mainly this one. This is for lettering and outlining. Bigger stuff. These are actual stripers. They’re all different sizes. A double zero is bigger than a triple zero. And then they make zeros and ones and twos. Eventually it’s like a damn house brush. I use triple zeros a lot. I have three of those.”
Mattox talks the way he paints, filling in details as he goes along and not necessarily planning things out beforehand.
“I start by drawing a centerline and I just go,” said Mattox. “I don’t know what it’s going to look like until it’s done. But I’m a big believer that simplicity holds up.”
There is a distinctive-looking piece hanging on the wall. Mattox obviously doesn’t intend on taking it to the Texas show.
“That’s one of the first pieces I did with the guy I learned from in California,” said Mattox. “I look at it now and I see all these things I’d do differently.”
Mattox isn’t concerned with following the crowd in his profession. He’s comfortable with his style and his method.
Jason Mattox completed a two color pinstriping on an old lacquer can in roughly 15 minutes. Mattox sells the cans at hot rod shows across the country where he can make as much as a few thousand dollars in a few days selling art and doing commissioned pieces onsite.
Photos by Brett Marshall/Kertis Creative.
“Some people draw grids out,” said Mattox, about how some artists achieve symmetry. “But I just got lost. There were too many lines. This way, there’s just one line. I drive myself insane. I’ve gotten to the end and wiped whole designs off because I just think, ‘Shit, I’ve messed a line up.’ I’ve been doing this since about the end of ‘05 and I still get nervous when I put my second color down. Because if you mess up with that second color, you’re done. You have to wipe everything off with mineral spirits and start again.”
Mattox’s approach has allowed him to develop a signature style that has earned him spotlights in car magazines from around the world. His popularity baffles him. He concentrates so much on his work that he doesn’t even know which of his designs are out in the world.
According to Mattox, there are a few cars and trucks floating around the area with his work on them, but he mostly earns his living on the road.
“At shows, I generally just do the work right there,” said Mattox. “I did a mini truck show down in Atlanta a few years ago. And it was only one other guy there doing it. I had a waiting list for two days. I had a piece of paper out. People wrote down their names and numbers. Whenever they brought their trucks in, they’d say, ‘So, should I come back in a couple hours?’ And I said, ‘No, you might as well stay here because in 20 minutes I’m gonna be done.’”
Mattox’s work keeps him on the road a lot, so it’s not surprising that he feels somewhat disconnected from pinstriping in the Louisville area. He’s like a touring musician stopping at as many festivals as possible.
The financial commitment of this line of work requires him to pay travel expenses as well as booth rental fees at shows. This has encouraged him to find creative ways to sell his work.
“I’ve been doing a lot of $30 to $40 panels,” said Mattox. “I try to keep it so that everybody can walk away with something. I try to keep everything at no more than $200 or $250. No more than that. I’ve got some motorcycle helmets that are in the $200 to $250 range. And then everything else – I try to keep my panels around $100 for the big ones.”
Mattox holds up an oblong piece that looks like a Melody Maker guitar body.
“I carted around this thing for like a year,” said Mattox. “I was trying to sell it without any stripes on it. And I was talking to my mom and we thought, at tattoo conventions, I’ve done raffles before. I’ll pick something and, you know, five bucks a chance! This convention I’m going to next week in Texas is huge. There will be thousands of people there. So I thought, ‘I’ll take that.’ And I striped it, so it’s updated a little bit. And I’m gonna be like, five bucks a chance or five tickets for $20. If I sell five tickets to 500 people at 20 bucks a pop, that’s 10 grand! And people don’t think twice about throwing down a 20 or a 5. They think, ‘That’s cool. It’s a $100 piece and I can win it for 20 bucks. Sure!’”
Mattox has always been interested in cars. He raced go-carts for 10 years and used to own a ‘53 Chevy. Now he has a motorcycle that he’s working on. Since he was always into this area of car culture, he gravitated to it in a way that suited his talents. However, he didn’t come to the art or the business fully formed. It has taken him years to get where he is now.
“When I ordered my stuff at first, I ordered the wrong brush,” said Mattox. “I ordered one for scroll work, which is the one for all the real swirly stuff. What I do is considered sword and dagger work. It’s a completely different brush.”
Mattox and his pinstriping friends have also learned hard lessons about which conventions are worth attending. He described one in Ohio as a “meth and whiskey festival” that he and his friend wanted to leave so badly that they made up a story about a sick kid at home. Otherwise, the other vendors wouldn’t have parted to let them out. The two then drove 16 hours or so to a conference in Oklahoma City. They arrived without any sleep and without knowing whether they could even find a spot to set up their booth. Mattox swore that he was too wiped out to do any car work. However, within minutes, he was painting lines on a car.
Days later, Mattox was looking at photos from the event. When he saw the picture of him painting the car, he asked when that had happened. As exhausted and amnesic as he was, he had dug in to the work and it turned out great.
“Maybe I should work like that more often,” said Mattox with a laugh.
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