PAINTED INSTRUMENTS & PORTRAIT ILLUSTRATIONS

MUSIC DRAWINGS! Music has always played a major role in my artwork whether it be blasting my favourite songs during my street painting performances, listening to albums in my studio or creating original soundtracks for my animations and videos. Several of my pieces even feature hidden instruments and caricatures of infamous bands and composers. Naturally this influence comes through in my illustrations and has attracted a number music lovers to the work. As a result I have received many requests to create musically themed art. This page features some examples of my melodic commissions.

Hand Painted Instruments have been popular as personalized commissioned pieces. I have done a variety of these over the years including full guitars, pic-cards, straps drum skins and small decorations to attach to microphones and tambourines. When I was a full time street artist I wasn't so good at documenting my art but I'll add more images if I find them. The two guitars I did have snapshots of show a psychedelic pic-guard and the “Eyeball City”.

For the pic-guard I wanted to represent the depths of the music as if a portal into another dimension. I used a receding perspective eyeball motif to mimic the imaginary realm of music. The “Eyeball City” steele guitar was also a private commission from a local musician. The instrument features the metropolis eye surrounded by strange gear shaped buildings and crowds of unusually intermingled denizens. The idea being that the city is like a giant machine but it’s up to all the crazy people to make it spin. I put the centrifugal eye at the mouth of the instrument to suggest music as the driving force behind this weird metropolis. The drawings were done directly on the steel guitar with metal primer and acrylic inks.

In addition to painting directly on instruments I have also done a few commissioned portraits of real life musicians. One series I did for a jazz cafe owner featured a bunch of surreal caricatures of famous jazz players mixed with my strange cartoon cities. Once again the idea was to relate the influence that music has on our life. This set included Louis Armstrong, Billy Holiday, John Coltraine, Eric Dolphy, Gary Bartz and the Sun Ra Archestra. I have done a few other artist's portrait in various styles and included the Stravinsky here as another example.