It takes someone with a unique style and a good sense of humor to look at a toilet seat and see a canvas just waiting to be emblazoned with a hot rod.
Gene Maynor, better known to his fans as Ratz, has been doing it for years.
"My art's been good to me. I can't complain," he said.
Commode lids aren't the weirdest things he's painted, though. He's put hot rod flames and spark plugs on a stuffed grouper and valve covers and pinstriping on cow skulls.
But most of his artwork can be spotted going down the highway at 60 miles an hour. He's well-known as a top pinstriper.
Maynor said he got started in the third grade when his teacher, Mrs. Matheson, encouraged him to pursue painting.
He won some art contests in school, but everything changed when he was about 16 and the over-the-top Rat Fink hot rod art of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth caught his eye.
"He was a big influence on me," Maynor said.
Maynor met Roth in California at Knotts Berry Farm in 1983. Roth looked at his work and gave him some invaluable advice, "The good Lord gave you talent — use it."
Shortly after that, Maynor began adorning hot rods with pinstripes and flames. He enjoyed putting classic designs on classic cars.
"I prefer the old '50s and '60s style of graphics," he said.
He spends his weekdays in Conover with his business partner, Chuck Chapman, at Chapman's Auto Body Repair Shop painting race cars and dragsters. He spends the rest of his time at Alley Ratz Studios in Lenoir.
A passenger car like a Ford Taurus can be painted for about $2,500, but a multi-colored race car demands a significantly higher level of expertise, and a good paint job can cost as much as $12,000, said Maynor.
Maynor said people come from as far away as Texas and New York to get him to paint their cars.
In some circles, vinyl decals are replacing hand-painted pinstripes, but Maynor insists on keeping his craft alive and paints every stripe by hand, clutching a tiny little brush.
"I stripe a lot of cars for different dealers in the Unifour," he said.
It's not just hot rods and cartoon commode lids — Maynor paints realistic scenes, too.
He helped create a duplicate of The Snowman's truck and trailer from the movie "Smokey and the Bandit." Maynor painted the 40-foot mural of an Old West scene on the side of the trailer — and he used a half-inch brush to do it.
He finished the job in about two months.
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