Mike Lyon

Painting Drawing Printmaking Japanese Woodblock Printing Furniture Lighting

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 […]

Two small woodcuts using a wedged registration jig

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Many mokuhanga (Japanese technique woodcut) printers are using an L-shaped kento registration jig. This is so each block can be carved without registration kento and a corner pushed into the L-shaped jig during printing. One disadvantage of this method is that the block and jig can easily shift during handling and printing so registration is […]

Secret Garden (clover woodcut)

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“Secret Garden” is a view of clover near my Kansas City home, shot with my iPhone while walking Daisy, our dog. I still have this unreasonable urge to print more and more intensely complex images, but these dozen blocks, though not huge, took an average of around 20 hours each to carve (the longest carving […]

The XYZs of Post-Digital Gesture: Drawings & Prints by Mike Lyon

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242 S. Santa Fe Salina, KS, 67401 785.827.1431 info@salinaartcenter.org Salinaartcenter.org Exhibition walk-through The XYZs of Post-Digital Gesture: Drawings & Prints by Mike Lyon January 18 – April 16, 2017 Mike Lyon’s work is not digital art. Lyon is a pioneering figure in the emergent field of post-digital printmaking and graphics. [The first major study of […]

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 […]

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 […]