Jeff McCann owned his first motorcycle in 1965 at the age of 20 and began to experiment with customization in 1968 on a Triumph 650, followed later that same year with his first Harley Davidson. His talent for art, first evident as a schoolboy, soon led him into a career in lithography and printing, however his part-time work on his own projects and paint jobs for friends began to take over. So much so, that in 1978, Jeff painted over 100 motorcycles, cars, vans and even two snowmobiles !
It was during this period that his association with Arlen Ness began to flourish. Arlen, a prolific painter in his own right with his own considerable skills, could not manage to achieve the sort of effects with pinstriping and leafing that's become the trademark of Jeff McCann's unique talent.
In the early seventies, they both owned small custom bike building shops in the Bay area of San Francisco, when the Chopper boom was at its peak, fuelled by the success of the film "Easy Rider".
As Arlen's business started out, McCann helped his friend by turning his hand to designing, photographing and printing the first Ness catalog, including creating the classic wing logo.
Increasingly, he would be given a free hand with designing the colour scheme on Ness bikes with Arlen's only proviso "...gimme lotsa leaf...!" which is how the distinctive style evolved.
The basic artistic principles behind McCann's use of color, stem from his experience in the printing field. In this medium, all colours are created from yellow, red, blue or black. He mixes hot and cold hues together, based on a common primary colour, to dramatic effect. Two typical examples of this technique are Arlen's FXR, aptly named, "Simply Orange" and Rikki Battistini's Sport Liner "Purple Haze", illustrating how seemingly incompatible colors such as orange and turquoise merge and compliment each other under McCann's skillfull direction.
"Purple Haze" marked McCann's growing association with Arlen's European distributor Battistinis, who became respected bike builders in their own right. The first example of Jeff's work to cross the Atlantic was the Lowrider "Mark III", commissioned by Jeff Duval, one of the founders of Battistinis, in 1992. Like Ness, Duval also gave McCann a free hand, but challenged him to somehow capture an essentially British bike feel.
The result speaks for itself and McCann went onto strengthen the Battistini link with "The Corsa". Duval wanted to recreate the classical style of the '50's Italian racers using genuine Ferrari reds and yellows and, of course, plenty of gold leaf !
McCann recently received official recognition of his artistic achievements, with two Ness bikes featuring his paintwork now permanently on display in the "California Dreaming" wing of the Oakland Museum, an exhibition mounted in order to illustrate both the influence and the contribution of local artists to the creative world in such diverse mediums as movie making and vehicle customizing.
In typically idiosynchratic style, Jeff McCann sums up his achievements by remarking that most artists have to be dead to receive that kind of recognition, but he just smells that way! That fitting endorsement finally rubberstamps his own signature which charismatically appears secretly somewhere on all his finished works. It simply reads...."Motorcycles Forever".