Mike Lyon

Painting Drawing Printmaking Japanese Woodblock Printing Furniture Lighting

Miguel – painting – 42 x 30 inches

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After the holiday, I made this second effort to portray my friend, Miguel Rivera, in square spirals, emphasizing this surprising optical illusion border of diamonds and diagonals even though every mark in the painting is either vertical or horizontal.

First medium scale square spiral paintings

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My first efforts to make medium scale paintings on paper using acrylic paint pens in a special jig I designed and built for the purpose. The paint pens I chose are made by Molotow and have a fibrous tip that is charged and recharged by pushing the tip into the body of the pen and […]

Untitled self portrait: edition of 17 drawings

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My untitled self portrait for a print exchange exhibited at Southern Graphics Council 2019 in Dallas. Description of processes A print is an image made from a matrix. The matrix is typically an intaglio plate, relief block, lithographic surface, or stencil. The matrix can produce a quantity of like images. The matrix for my edition […]

“Elena” life size pen and ink drawing

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This was a long LONG process. Large drawings like this always take a long time, but this one took about a month of more or less continuous drawing. Aerialist, Elena Sherman, daughter of my friend, Cori Sherman North, agreed to model. I particularly liked this image of her and made a small drawing in addition […]

Small drawings with square spirals

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Why spirals? Because I can vary the density of my lines in any area without cross-hatching and without lifting the pen. This lends itself to the kind of repeating procedures (program) I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. But curving spirals (where the radius of the circle being drawn continuously expands from or contracts […]

Large drawing (Hal) with nested squares

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One issue with my simple drawing tools is that, for the most part, the mark produced is uniform in width and color (one exception is a brush. The brush can be pushed into the surface to make a thicker mark or pulled out to leave a thinner one). It occurred to me that, already having […]

32 Small drawings with characters

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July through November of 2018 I made a slew of small drawings in ink on paper using the two AxiDraw machines. From time to time as I work, I’ll edit and modify my program code so that the way I produce images changes. Most coders I’ve talked with are careful to archive each state of […]

Peregrine Bunny

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For several months I’d been immersed in a large commission piece for a very large corporation. It was a big project and was required to sign an NDA / non-disclosure agreement. There was a lot of back and forth as a number of executives added their input, taste, requirements to the pot and that made […]