About

First, About The Art

I firmly believe we all have some inner song that needs to be heard. With that in mind, my art made the switch from "fantasy art" to "homebrew luthiery" in '24 - I am now exploring the craft of creating musical instruments. Currently the main focus is on guitar repair and building, and I am finding that it comes rather naturally to me.

I certainly don't pretend to call myself a "luthier", but I do have a deep background in art and building things with my hands and what I now create are solid players with good sound. Each new build presents both a dip into my own past and a blank canvas to create something unique and refine my craft.

I want to do something more, something higher, something deeper, and create something substantively human. Right now that means guitars made from cigar boxes. It may be something else in the future. I don't know what just yet, but that's what makes this artistic journey engaging.

As for right now? I build 'em, you play 'em. It's your song.

About Me

So then, about "me". Talking about myself and my studio in third person seems overly pretentious and I'm just not comfortable with what I call the royal "we". It's properly weird in my honest opinion and I honestly don't know why so many other do it. I'm not gonna do it here with my online bumf as there's no "we" or "us" behind this - it's just me running this whole enterprise. That said...

I have been creating art since I was a kid, beginning with little more that a standard No. 2 pencil and office supplies my mother would buy for my birthdays. It also happens that my grandpa was a gunsmith and I spent a lot of time in his shop learning and being in awe of what was being created there before he passed away. The creative path was set.

I later moved to acrylic paints and was selling art and doing murals by the time I was in college. Somewhere along the way I married, divorced, and then made the decision to work as a veterinary technician to care for shelter animals, and though I packed my tools and brushes away, I never got rid of them as I moved and lived in different parts of the country. No regrets, of course, but it did put the art on a slow burn somewhere in the background.

To be honest, it took someone's constant badgering to convince me to dig my craft out out and start creating again. I did a few sketches. I bought new paint. The stories started flowing again. I built a guitar and now the stories had song. The ideas are still rather random but I'm beginning to see some common themes in my work, and that has been eye-opening.

More than anything, though, I have learned to have patience with myself as I explore how things actually work and then applying the techniques I've learned over the years to explore what light and darkness and sound and texture can do when they all work together. It's also a rather apt metaphor for my life, I think. 

This work is as much for me as anyone else, but it is also a gift I like to share and maybe get a smile or start a conversation, and that's what truly motivates me to keep going.

~Wolf