Life Drawing

Here is a link to a short selection of conte on newsprint life drawings, one of my favourite things to do...ever. I am compiling as many as I can these days for an upcoming artshow in the fall of the new year.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30338815@N03/sets/72157608243264928/show/

Homemade Banjos

Since I am a musician and in a few bands you can probably see the connection between the earlier work using a handmade approach to gourds and vessels and how it led me to start making my own instruments with the same material. Here are two of my latest pieces. The first one pictured here is one complete gourd and I have just cut away the side to stretch the skin. You tune this one by sliding the strings up and down the shaft. The larger one is still in progress and needs more shaping on the neck which is carved and shaped all by hand.

Compound Ceramic Forms

These forms are like a pot in a pot in a pot. They are not assmebled after firing but actually the compound forms are all thrown at the same time. So for each piece I start pulling up the wall of the innermost form first until it is like a finished pot. Then I pull up the next wall and close it around the first one being really careful not to touch the first wall and rip the piece in two as it spins around on the wheel. Really fun to make and as you can see I usually prefer an unglazed finish to allow the feeling of the original clay to come through instead of a polished, glassy look.

Ceramics

I work in ceramics and now use the throwing wheel for just about all of it. These forms were thrown with the closed ends at the top while being careful to maintain a consistent wall thickness. I then cut them off the wheel at the bottom and carved out the holes you see when the clay was half dried and easier to hold without collapsing the forms.

Vessels and a Comic

Here are a few shots of some drinking vessels and a basket that I made by hand as part of an art project where exploration of the now almost forgotten low tech world of living off the land was seducing me. These items were collected from the landscape and crafted into functional tools, even the cord on the gourd I wove out of corn husk.

Here is a short comic project I drew/inked/wrote in the small slivers of spare time that I could pull out of the finger of my life.....It ended up being published in an anthology. Click on them for a closer look if you want.

t-shirts

Here are t-shirts I designed and illustrated for 2 bands. The first one is a great bluegrass band www.foggyhogtownboys.com and is the new band logo and the second shirt was an image pulled from the CD booklet for www.chriscoole.com . This CD booklet had an image to represent each song instead of a full description, I thought it was a cool idea when Chris pitched it to me and I had a great time working on it. I also included a few of the other booklet images here.