About

First, About The Art

I get it - you've come here and are finding an unusual mix of musical instruments and fantasy art and aren't sure what's going on here. This has been a transitional year for me as an artist.

I was well on my way to even more detailed and photorealistic fantasy art when the whole text-based image generative "AI" bomb was dropped on my front lawn - it's like someone put John Carpenter's "The Thing" in a photocopier and used the printouts to TP the trees. I cannot tell you how many subpar pinup and fantasy images I've seen that have been generated by script pirates who have NO deeper understanding of what they're passing off as "art", but I imagine the raw acreage would rival the deforestation rate in the Amazon.

One thing I found trapped beneath that gargantuan pink-eyed homonculus was the quintessentially human desire for those who may not have the skillset to actually create something. I can't fault that. I firmly believe we all have some sort of inner song that needs to be heard. With that in mind, I started a new venture into 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 what I now create are solid players with good sound, and each new build presents both a dip into history and a blank canvas to create something new and refine my craft.

There isn't any "AI" or script monkey that can follow me. Sure, I could choose to still throw hands with the best of the image generators, but I want to do something more, something higher, something deeper, something substantively human.

Right now that means guitars. 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 weirdly overly pretentious and I'm just not comfortable with what I call the royal "we". I honestly don't know why so many other do it, but I'm not gonna do it here with my online bumf. It's just me.

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. 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 brushes away, I never got rid of them as I moved and lived in different parts of the country. 

To be honest, it took someone's constant badgering to convince me to dig those brushes out and start using them again. I did a few sketches. I bought new paint. The stories started flowing again. I really have trouble finishing a thing before a new idea demands my attention. I paint and draw and create art to share what is in my mind's eye and dreams and to meditate in the process. The ideas are rather random but I'm beginning to see some common themes in my work, and it 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