Creating stained-glass artworks with trashed vintage Porsches

Ben Tuna is good at transforming rusted-out, patina-eaten wrecks into art.

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CALIFORNIA - Ben Tuna is good at transforming rusted-out, patina-eaten wrecks into art.

For the past few months, in a nondescript stucco warehouse in a sleepy street in Glendale, California, he has used stained glass salvaged from sanctuary tableaus to rebuild the windows of a 1965 Porsche 911 he found derelict in Ohio.

Once empty, the frames are now filled with palm-size fragments of centuries-old church glass that glow like a sacred kaleidoscope. Halo-clad seraphim in verdant robes grace the rear of the car, the cameo face of a bearded prophet in deep repose appears at shotgun.

In the past weeks, though, the second-generation stained-glass artist has been alchemizing something that hits closer to home: vintage classics torched in the Los Angeles fires in January and left for junk.

"When the fire happened, I started seeing all these great cars on Instagram, and I knew they'd just be thrown away," says Tuna, 30. "I was, like, 'I have to intercept some of these. I can do something so cool with them."

Now, with the melodies of American jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery wafting through the wooden rafters of his Glass Cowboy shop and an assistant working quietly nearby, Tuna is adding reclaimed glass to a 1965 Porsche 356 that burned in the Palisades — near pink hibiscus blooms, the hand of a saint reaching heavenwards through golden fleur-de-lis and dark roundels.

"My dad was an incredible artist," Tuna says. "I got my colour knowledge from him. It's my colour selection, my use of colour and material, that separates my work from everyone else's."

He displayed his initial Porsche 911 publicly for the first time at the Motorluxe gala on Aug 13, during Monterey Car Week in Carmel, California.

The Porsche 356, to be unveiled to the public at a later date, is the first of at least four LA fire cars he will recast as art pieces to sell.

The series is not about restoration. It is called Resurrection.