Lines, Harleys and blues in Durango

On his Facebook page, Kirk James’s subtitle says, “Plays blues guitar, rides Harleys and pinstripes hot rods!” That pretty well sums it up. Now 56, he’s made his living doing pinstriping, commercial art and blues music since the early 1980s.

He started out as a commercial artist and illustrator and had been a car and motorcycle enthusiast since he was a kid. As he got more into the digital side of advertising and graphic design, though, Kirk decided he liked the illustration side more than doing ad layouts.

“For years, friends told me that I should try striping motorcycles,” he says, “but I didn’t think I had a steady enough hand. A friend of mine is a motorcycle mechanic, and one day I walked into his garage and found him playing with a Steve Kafka striping brush on a fender. He gave it to me to try out, and it was a kick. I ordered some brushes and started working at it.