There are a handful of people that have transcended hot rods and have become “respected” artists outside the world of cars. If you mention Coop, Big Daddy or Von Dutch, people outside our culture get what you’re talking about. Robert Williams nudges into that territory a bit, but he’s never been a household name. Too bad, because his art captures the unhinged, outlaw side of hot rodding.

He was born in 1942 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and exhibited a talent for art at a very young age. That could’ve led him in a completely different direction if it wasn’t for the fact that his father owned a drive-in called The Parkmore in Montgomery, Alabama, a joint with carhop service, greasy hamburgers and hot rods, straight out of American Graffiti. Williams was steeped in car culture, and he got his first car — a 1934 Ford five-window coupe — at the age of 12.

His parents married and divorced four separate times, and the marital strain took its toll on the boy. During the final split, Williams moved to Albuquerque with his mother, and ended up a juvenile delinquent, expelled from high school and involved in gang activity. To escape jail time, at the age of 20, Williams fled New Mexico for Los Angeles, where he enrolled in art courses at Los Angeles City College.

At LACC, he found his passion, and not just for art. He met his future wife there, and in two months, they were married, and Williams left school, supporting himself and his new wife by drawing cartoons. Soon after, he found a gig as an art director at Black Belt magazine, a martial arts monthly from back in the day when there was such a thing. According to the book The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams, he got canned a few months later, because instead of pasting up the magazine as his job required, he was more interested in drawing lavishly detailed illustrations, which would become the kind of work he was recognized for later on.

Without a regular gig, Williams ended up at the unemployment office’s career center, looking for anything that would pay regular wages. In an insane stroke of luck, the career officer noted that there was one place that could use his talents, but every artist they’d sent there had come back horrified. That employer was a hot rod shop/publishing house/studio in Maywood, run by a beatnik weirdo named Ed Roth.

From the book The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams: “He now had a real artist’s job, he was being paid three times what he had been before, and what’s more, he didn’t have to wear a suit and tie! He was only minimally distracted when he was issued a pistol as part of his art equipment, due to a running feud between Big Daddy and a local outlaw motorcycle group that accused Roth of exploiting their image in his magazine, Choppers.”

Cars are hard to paint, and cars with chrome are nearly impossible. That’s where Williams had success. His talent at painting specular reflection meant that when other artists could draw and paint amazing automobiles, they’d hire Williams to come in and make the chrome look real.

They say “write what you know.” Girls, guns, cars and violence became a Williams staple, because that’s what he knew. Paintings with names like “A White Knuckle Ride for Lucky St. Christopher,” “Hittin’ a Glass Truck at Midnight” and “Snuff Fink” depict comic-style action on the very verge of disaster. There’s so much going on in the details, you can spend hours retracing your steps.

As Roth’s publishing empire was winding down, Williams started selling some of his elaborate oil paintings, and eventually sold work to another outsider art icon, Robert Crumb, which were published in Crumb’s bizarro Zap Comix.

Williams managed to ride every avant garde art wave there was between the 1960s and 1990s, embraced by the punk rock crowd, and later by the artists like Frank Kozik and Coop that were firing their own lowbrow art at an unsuspecting public in the 1990s. Galleries like La Luz de Jesus — which promoted the work of artists that had formerly been derided as “illustrators — resurrected Williams career at that time, too.

In 1994, Williams founded Juxtapoz magazine, which was eventually put out by High Speed Productions, which published Thrasher, the killer skateboard magazine that helped to reignite  interest in skateboarding in the 1980s.

Juxtapoz reflected Williams’ Kustom Kulture style,  a combination of California “Big Daddy” Ed Roth-style pop surrealism, and the kind of craftsmanship exhibited by the best illustrators.  By 2009, Juxtapoz was — by far — the most popular art magazine in the United States, due largely in part to the fact that it wasn’t as stuffy and dry as most art magazines were, and its embrace of pop culture, cars, and everything else traditional art people don’t really like.

Williams’ most controversial work was Appetite for Destruction, which was — for a very short period of time — feature on the cover of the Guns ‘n’ Roses album of the same name, until public outcry over its perceived misogyny forced Geffen Records to move it to the inside sleeve. On the furor, Williams was unapologetic: “It is my artistic right to render the images of woman as my imagination sees fit. Remember, I will gladly accept the title “Bad Person” to continue my expression,” he said. “In other words, nothing short of death will stop me from painting nekkid ladies.”

A new documentary called Robert Williams, Mr. Bitchin’ is available on DVD at Williams’ website.