WILDWOOD - If you suffer from motion sickness, have a heart condition or happen to be pregnant, you probably shouldn't ride the artwork of Peter Bieling.

Bieling's most famous art isn't hanging on a wall or roped off in some gallery: His colorful and bizarre work is framed by the beach, the boardwalk and the neon lights in Wildwood. The native of Florence, Burlington County, has been applying custom paint jobs to dozens of amusements for Morey's Piers since 1995.

"I'm always amazed that I get paid to do this," said Bieling, standing in paint-spattered pants beneath a historical panorama he painted on the Wave Swinger, a ride on Morey's Mariner's Landing Pier.

Bieling, grandson of Dutch painter and sculptor Herman Bieling, has been making critical and commercial art nearly all his life along with his wife and five children. He's painted the interiors of $45 million mansions in Connecticut, steakhouses in New York, storefronts off South Street, and dozens of billboards on the Walt Whitman Bridge.

"I can't tell you how many times I've painted Frank Sinatra's face," he said.

Every spring, Bieling spends weeks touching up past works or starting new projects for the Morey family. For several years, his son Peter C. Bieling has worked alongside him on those empty, desolate piers.

"It's good conversation," said the younger Bieling, 27. "If we argue, it's always about color."

The idea for most amusements is to create a colorful theme that melds with other rides on the pier and gets the emotions pumping before the tickets are bought.

On Mariner's Landing, natural disasters and infamous beasts rule, and the Bielings have obliged with snarling bears, sea dragons and Viking warriors.

On the stomach-churning Moby Dick, which Bieling traveled to Colorado to paint, whalers bedecked in yellow rain slicks hurtle through the air as the infamous white whale's tail rains hell upon their boats.

Off to the right, a teardrop runs down the eye of a smaller sperm whale, one of the many oddities Bieling hides in his work, along with with his Web site, and even the phone number of his boss.

"You try to make each one a little special, with something custom, hence the whale crying," he said. "It's crying because its mother is being killed."

The man paying Bieling to be creative, Jack Morey, has pulled the reins in a few times on his eclectic painter, which is why Dante's Inferno, a dark, haunted-house ride named after the famous epic poem, is now Dante's Dungeon.

"I think he took it too literal," Morey said with a laugh. "I was sort of proud of it, but the customers said it was way too much."

Bieling said he was just following the book.

"I thought I was supposed to be showing the reality of the world we live in, with all the sins," Bieling said. "It was too controversial."

The tortured souls of the Inferno have now been replaced with day-glo grim reapers, crazed death gods, and a handful of ghouls that appear much more menacing at night.

"We always manage to come to some kind of agreement," Bieling said of his relationship with Morey.

It's not the first time the two have disagreed on how a project should proceed, and it may be the reason Bieling painted Morey's cell-phone number in an underground portion of the log flume, or a bare bottom on their latest work in a bumper-car pavilion that was damaged by fire last year.

"I don't think he knows about that one yet," Bieling said, as both he and his son chuckled.

The custom artwork of amusements, carnivals and seaside resorts isn't a subject that often gets bandied about in highbrow circles, but that changed in the late 1990s when a University of Pennsylvania architectural study concluded that in order for Wildwood to prosper, it needed to stay retro.

For Morey, it meant trying not to compete with the likes of Disney or Six Flags and embracing the history of amusements in Wildwood.

"We wanted to take the art of boardwalk very seriously," he said.

That meant more work for a guy like Bieling, who mostly sticks to paintbrushes rather than airbrushes or computer programs.

In 2002, armed with black-and-white photos, postcards and hours after hours of research, Bieling took on his biggest project for Morey's Piers - the Wave Swinger.

The 43-foot-tall ride, which resembles a spinning top with 48 swings hanging beneath it, was manufactured in Germany and featured 86 panels, all depicting various scenes from the Bavarian countryside. Those Bavarian panels were nice to look at, Bieling said, but not exactly relevant to Wildwood.

"It didn't fit into the theme of the pier at all," he said.

Over several months in his Burlington County studio, using acrylics, Bieling turned each panel into a snapshot from Wildwood's past.

The final product, Morey said, has become a piece of living history for the entire island.

"It truly is art in motion," he said.

William C. Hunt, a Wildwood boardwalk pioneer who owned piers and theaters at the resort, is honored in one panel. In another are Morey's Piers founders Will and Bill Morey, launching their Jersey Shore empire in 1969.

One series of panels chronicles a timeline of beachwear, from pajama-like suits in 1926 to bikinis in 1985. Panels commemorate former amusements, such as the Pirate Ship Skua, the Haunted House and the Golden Nugget Mine Ride, which was taken down in January.

Wildwood historian Ralph Grassi, who runs a Web site dedicated to defunct rides on the boardwalk, said Bieling helped make the Wave Swinger an icon.

"There's really nothing like it around," Grassi said. "It's a hand-painted piece of history."

There's even a self-portrait of Bieling, in his traditional Panama hat, with "I painted this!" written beneath.

Swinging through the air on the Wave Swinger, amid a backdrop of colored lights, amusement-park screams and the beach, Bieling said, is just about the perfect way to experience his art.

"It's all so overwhelming and people enjoy it," he said. "I've got a real good canvas down here."

Bieling will be featured in Jack Wright's "A Wild Ride," chronicling Morey's Piers's 40 years. The book will be launched 4 p.m. Thursday near the Tea Cups ride at Morey's Mariner's Landing Pier in Wildwood, on the Boardwalk near Schellinger Avenue. Guests can RSVP online at http://www.moreyspiers.com.

For more information on Peter Bieling's art, visit http://bielings.com.