Mike Lyon

Painting Drawing Printmaking Japanese Woodblock Printing Furniture Lighting

UMB Zen Garden Meeting Room design and construction

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I was commissioned to design a meeting room at UMB Technology Center (UMB is a major regional bank). UMB named the room ‘Zen Garden’, and I’m told it’s the most popular place in the building. I made (with my own hands) everything in them room, including a table with six chairs, two large benches, two ceiling elements, […]

Triangle tiled scroll woodcuts

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I made three large woodcut ‘scrolls’ in September of 1999. Two of them were installed in the Zen Garden Room I designed and built for the UMB Technology Center in Kansas city. Two of the prints were similar (I kept one for myself), and the third was twice as wide. I had already cut a bunch […]

Hand Print Stool

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This stool has cherry legs and a birch wood seats. I was tired of sanding, had made some ugly stretchers, and didn’t like the leg orientation, so I tried to pull this piece through with paint. I painted the legs and braces black, and then covered my hands with blue paint and picked up the stool. It turned […]

Torii Stool

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OK, this has to be my best stool. I can’t keep my eyes off it. Proportions are just right, the seat so organically curved, the joints well formed and tight. It’s pretty perfect. And one leg (must be the back one in this photo) has the most beautiful open knot just above the knee. I was looking for the feel […]

Checker Stools

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I spent three weeks in the fall of 1998 at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado adding to my traditional moku-hanga and other water based print making skills with Hiroki Morinoue and Allen Smith. An artist in residence there, Ulrika Scriba from Gengenbach, Germany, was especially interested in the several booklets I had authored […]

Flat Top Stools

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These two stools both incorporate half-inch thick cherry wood seats. In order to feel secure when sitting down, I re-inforced the seats with a pair of strips underneath running across the grain and glue joints. The stools use wedged through tenon construction throughout, and the legs are pinned to the seats with purple heart dowel (after I […]

First Stools

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My first stool is all cherry wood, with a deeply sculpted seat. Looks like it would be dangerous, but it’s really quite comfortable. The top is painted a beautiful, deep, ultramarine, and the legs have been lightly stained red. Not bad for a first attempt, but not nearly as nice as the second. The  second stool has a […]

Tea Room Table and Chairs

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These are my first furniture designs. Built from old fir high-school bleachers I salvaged plus some used fir 2x4s from concrete forms, these went into the tea room of the Kansas City Shotokan Karate dojo. Padauk wood inlay was used in the five chairs and table top to fill the many holes and defects in the old […]

Tiled Floor of vertical grain oak and padauk

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While building the dojo floor for the KC Shotokan Karate Club, we decided to leave an area for visitors and observers. We built benches along the windows, and I designed, built and laid this beautiful wood tile floor. First I measured the area, then designed the tile size (tiles had to be less than 4.5″ square so […]