Gates, furniture and the No Anchovies job

Before the angels and the critters, John's work took in a long list of crafts. His old bio names murals, themed environments, haunted attractions, faux finish painting, furniture, photography, fossil and dinosaur egg restoration, and decorative gates and doors.

The gates and doors had their own page on the old site, and the one with a story in its title is the Gate of Nails. One photograph, titled "Building a gate out of nails," shows it lying flat on a table in the shop: an arched steel frame filled with short lengths of nail welded crosswise into a dense, open lattice. Finished, it stands in an arched adobe wall, with a garden path showing through the gaps. Seen from below, the sky shows through it.

John's first sculpture had nails in it too. In The Artist and the Algorithm he tells how, at age five, he asked the workers building the house next door for some of their wood scraps:

I had no business wielding a hammer at that age but there it was my first sculpture. I found some random paint colors and painted it… bent nails and all lol

The welding came later. In his words:

Around age 21, I knew I needed to learn how to weld. So… I did what any sensible, ambitious artist would do: I bought a cheap, beat-up welder and started sticking pieces of metal together until something held.

The rest of the page is working steel for homes. A screen door carries a palm tree cut in silhouette. Security doors are drawn in curving lines, in scrolls, and in one case with a fish skeleton laid across the panel. Railings run in scrolls along a loft and above a kitchen.

Two photographs are titled "No Anchovies" restaurant. They show the patio there, with umbrellas, plants and square tables. One of those tables appears again on the old Furniture page, titled "Table at No Anchovies."

Furniture and lighting

Furniture is on the list of work John did before he settled on metal art, along with murals, themed environments and gates and doors. His old site kept a page of it, Furniture and Lighting, with titles and no words.

Several tables are built around stone. Two carry slabs of orbicular granite, a gray stone patterned with dark rings, one on a single steel post over a round base and one on a curved steel frame. Another stone-topped console holds a lamp with a white globe inside a steel ring, beside a steel seahorse. A marble table is inlaid with curling vines and leaves.

Other pieces are steel through and through: a long steel table with a hammered surface, a dark table on bolted legs, and a round lazy susan with an ammonite set at its center. A tall DVD cabinet stands between two crescent shapes. A headboard of rusted steel, with a dark glossy inset, comes with matching side tables and lamps.