The Swirl and the Box

The Tea Strainer Goggles

The tea strainer goggles have been around for quite some time now, but it wasn’t until recently that I thought they deserved their own post. They are very useful for traveling the vast cosmos, great for performing experimental improvised music in front of strangers, and real simple and cheap to make. Basically it’s just two tea strainers wired together. Unfortunately I think the Dollar store became hip to my game, and stop stocking them some time last year.

Where Bad Guitars Go To Die

Harri's head on the Copper man with some dead trees

Again with the dead trees

This here is a few of the trees that I have been finding at friends houses and various other bars or restaurants around the neighborhood. I wasn’t very good at documenting things there for a while. I think I’ve got about another one hundred and seventy six to track down.

Electric Guitar Table Number Three

I think this is it for the time being. I seem to have run out of electric guitar bodies. No worries I’m sure more will be on there way very soon. Now I just have to figure out what to do with the necks.

Any suggestions?

Death Dress

Guitar Table two

The Giant Swirl

Often I find myself sitting in my workshop, which is also my spaceship for hours on end, sifting through all the wonderful pieces of “what the heck is that” that have accumulated over the years. Things found on the street, things that the local inhabitants of my neighborhood donate to the cause by leaving there garbage on my doorstep or at my local watering hole. Broken chairs and video machines are all the craze this summer. Picking up one piece of junk and trying to match it to another can often take hours, but there are also the times when things just fall nicely into place. I once woke from my peaceful slumber with the idea for a frame in my foggy head. With out giving it a second thought I pulled the futon from the spare room and started cutting it into it’s predestine lengths. Went back to bed when I was done and woke up a few hours later only to find my futon was gone and my dream was leaning against the wall in my living room.
What you just read there was an excerpt from an internet article I was asked to write some time ago about the creative process. I was very excited to be a part of it and quickly went to work on my first ever web published piece of writing. When I was done I sent it off eagerly awaiting a response as to when I could see my word on the world wide web, that was two years ago, know body has contacted me since. Ah well, we all must solider on.The piece I was writing about was the one you see above. I had started the illustrations some eighteen years ago. I was using the backs of 16x20 black and white photos that I had messed up in printing, and me not being one who likes to waste thought I could put them to good use. Or maybe I was just to cheep to buy paper.
All the above is true. It was my futon and I did create the frame in a drowsy haze. It had been sitting packed away for years in my portfolio because I had no idea what to do with it. Looking back now I see that it was the beginnings of my recycling, and swirl obsessions.
The piece has been hanging up in the Starlight lounge in Kitchener/Waterloo area now for about four years. I think they may have squatter’s rights now.

Electric Guitar Side Table

I don’t know how to start this entry. I have had this guitar body for quite some time now, and I have always wanted to build and instrument from it. A friend of mine Dave had made this body a few years ago. Being the busy man he is the project had to be abandoned, so he passed it on to me as a gift.
The longer I had it sitting in my space room the more I thought about building an electric guitar. It seemed that at some point, which I am not very clear on this voice started whispering to me, asking me what I knew about building electric guitars. I thought you made experimental instruments? Do you even know how to play and electric guitar, or acoustic for that matter? What do you know about tension, action, intonation, and tunings? So in all honesty I thought to myself, these are great questions and they deserve and answer, but that’s not going to happen here. I did what had to be done. I shut that little voice down with my own special bleed of potato based beverages and proceeded to build my first real electric guitar. The first thing I needed was a neck for the body so I started the long and thorough task of carving one out of a nice piece of oak I had from a counter top we were pulling out of a house. Once the neck was done all I had to do was calculate the fret placement add the pickups and the string her up. All these things combined were about ten times easier than carving that neck and heck the body was already build with all the appropriate holes in place. So how did this become a side table? Good question. As I was piecing everything together I placed the body on a little stand that was sitting beside me in the space room so I could place the electronics in and wire them up. Like most projects I work on I find I can get distracted at the drop of a hat, after all I do work in a space room. So needless to say the body sat on that stand for days, and as those days increased in number so did the things that were piled on to of the body. I could no longer see the electronics, just there to add screws. I do still think of adding strings, but that might be a bit of overkill. I think I random tools and scraps of metal. At that point the instrument had rebuilt itself into a side table, and I realized that I was just will take a page from Dave’s book and abandon it where it is.

On a side note I would like to point out that I left one of the holes open so I could have a place to store all my picks.

The Tractor Stool

Here is one of my new pieces of furniture I have started building out of junk materials and found objects. I got this idea a few years ago after waking up to find a new set of speaker stands in my living room. I thought I had dreamed about it at first, but when I woke up one afternoon to start my day, walking out to the living room to check my email, and thinking to myself how nice that would have been if they were real. Maybe one day I will build some stands. Well it wasn’t a dream; I got up in the middle of the night, cut the wood, built the stands, painted them then went back to bed.

This isn’t the first time that has happened, as soon as I can get my hands on an image of a four by four foot illustration I framed one night in what I thought was a dream I will post it.

The bass of the stool is from a draft beer tap I got from a bar we were rebuilding, I think it belongs to a Fosters tap, so I feel good about dismantling it. The bar for the back rest was given to me by a Fembot that goes by the name Brian. The round handle was a gift from a man named Flavio (if that is his real name) and the tractor stool I found out west in Calgary a few years ago. I left it in my friend’s trunk and it stayed there for almost another year until he showed up in Toronto for a vacation and handed it to me, by that point I had totally forgotten about it, so it was kind of like getting a nice present from Wick, as opposed to all that junk he gives me.

Aliens and other random illustrations

What a crazy illustration. It was when I was into my drawing everything to look like hot alien chicks faze. Now I just don't pick the ink up, it was really starting to interfere with my relationship.
Here are some other Alien like illustrations for your enjoyment

The Bad Things I do With Cameras

The poor Fembots are always victims to my deranged camera ways

Ride into the Sun

View this clip on Vimeo

Once again I have used a Fembots song and added a bunch of moving pictures to it. All of the images I found on an Edison web site. I like a train, that’s why I like these images. You can find all kinds of wacky videos on my other blogs, some are out in the open and some are hidden. There is no real rhyme or reason for this. It’s just the way it goes.

Tree Paintings and Illustrations

Tree Horizon

Saturn Post 1999 and everything else in this Solar System

Saturn is my third favorite of all the planets, not only in our Solar System, but the entire universe as well.

So what better way is there to express my love for this great large gaseous ball than with acrylics on canvas?

Of coarse Earth is not in this equation, but if it were, then I guess Saturn now becomes my forth favorite planet.

It has been many years since I have painted a planet.

Bits and Scraps

The backs of metal dresses.
I get the name for this piece because 98% of it consists of the back of a metal dress I made for a fashion show that took place at Gallery 1313 in Parkdale in the year of 2004.
Just click Metal Dresses to see more.

Basically this show was an attempt at combining some of the multiple interests that I have. I had just started working with wood in a slightly more comfortable fashion. Though saying that as I look back at some of the frames. I have to wonder, just where my head was at. I had also just come off a fashion show, and the metal dresses were dragging me down.

changed my world. It was also myThis was also my first time experiencing the joys of epoxy. It first time using photographs of old metal works in new pieces. Maybe one day I will make a dress out of photos from dresses long since given over to the rust of time and bad storage.

So here is a collection of pieces that consist of photographs, metal dress parts, computer parts, paintings and other nifty cast offs I found laying on my spaceship floor.

I used to have names for all of these illustrations, but that was another time, and it was long ago.

This was a piece from my Trash T.V. days.
That's my back.
Sometimes when people look at this image they feel uncomfortable because I'm naked.

Gear Head and all the Others

Gear Head is the most original thing I could come up with as a name for this fella. There are really only four gears on the whole thing, and three of them came together. Sometimes I just don't think things through. I'm committed now, no doubt about that.

Various Computer Components

This has always reminded me of my short wave radio I had as a small boy growing up on mars. I built it using the power of my mind, but I can't seem to tune any stations in.