Mike Lyon

Painting Drawing Printmaking Japanese Woodblock Printing Furniture Lighting

Allyson 46 x 25

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Drawing designed in 60 layers of colored ink lines but output via large format pigment printer rather than pen and ink.

Kelsey

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Kelsey Wroten is an amazing illustrator and graphic novelist. Originally from Kansas City, Kelsey now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. This portrait exists in two versions; first a pen and ink drawing on pigment tinted and painted paper; second as an archival pigmented (inkjet) print. Both were exhibited at the Salina Art Center where […]

Sinjun drawing 50 x 34 inches

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The fabulous photographer, Sinjun Strom, Minnesota native, was a student at the Kansas City Art Institute when she agreed to model for me. Not long after, she moved to New York to complete her Fine Arts degree at the School for Visual Arts. You can read about Sinjun in the New York Times and watch […]

Leone and Megan

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In 2015, Megan Mantia and Leone Reeves were performance artists in Kansas City (later in Los Angeles). I’d done some CNC routing to make huge letters for a project of theirs. They’d agreed to model and I’d asked them to choose clothing with pattern, stripes, and texture. They showed up at the studio in beards […]

Wow Mom and other textual drawings

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My mother was born January 7, 1931 and died May 5, 2013 at 82. She and Dad had been married since she was 18 and he 25. Her quality of life had been declining for seven or eight years due to a stubborn abdominal cancer and scoliosis complicated by, well, just getting older. Macular degeneration […]

The code that moves the pen makes the image…

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I had this confusing idea about somehow showing my code in a drawing. The drawing would be a self-portrait and the text that piled up to communicate the image would be the code that the pen followed in order to draw the text that made the image. A very circular process. You can read about […]

First textual drawings

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I spent a few months working out a kind of self-referential process I had in mind. The idea I had was to build images from text. The first step was to code general subroutines to draw text characters which could be scaled and drawn by CNC. I decided to code an outline typeface and I […]

Hanging Lamps

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My studio assistant (the late Nico Gogan / Carrie Riehl) and I used the CNC to drill two holes for the wire stem in each of hundreds of leaf-shapes and cut them out from a frosted acrylic sheet. Then I took them home and heated them on baking sheets in our oven and, wearing oven […]