Steampunk critters from scrap
Spiders, trilobites, grasshoppers and fish, built from scrap engine parts, pipe wrenches, gears and a billiard ball.
Pl. 1 · Spider.
John's old site kept a page called Miscellaneous Critters and another called Steampunk Fish. Between them they held more than seventy photographs and almost no words. The titles do much of the telling: Steampunk Spider, Steampunk Spider with Gauge, Billiard Ball Spider, Pipe Wrench Grasshopper, Steampunk Grumpy, and one that spells out the method, "Steampunk trilobite made from scrap engine parts."
On the old home page John describes how he works:
I use recycled automobile and bicycle parts, along with new steel and other miscellaneous parts and mediums to create sculptures and wall art.
The critters show it in plain sight. A spider stands on legs cut from steel plate, its body built around a gear. Another carries a round pressure gauge on its back. The billiard ball spider has a green number 14 ball for a body. The trilobites wear rows of ribbed engine parts down their backs, with round domes for eyes.
The fish hang on the wall as skeletons: a solid head, a long spine, and ribs fanned out in strips of steel, some with spikes along the top. In 2016 they covered the walls of John's booth at the gem show.
The creatures started early. The Artist and the Algorithm opens John's own story this way:
I always knew I was supposed to be an artist. Even as a little kid, while other kids were memorizing multiplication tables, I was busy doodling spaceships, alien creatures, and random universes on the backs of my homework assignments.
Today he works from a full fabrication shop with CNC plasma cutting tables and 3D design software, and he learned to run it himself:
I taught myself how to weld, how to use CAD, and even how to program the CNC equipment. Turns out, stubbornness is a hell of a teacher.
At the end of The Artist and the Algorithm, John's biography sums up the range:
His work ranges from steampunk to spiritual, blending raw materials with vision to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
The book's gallery chapter includes a tall seahorse forged from recycled parts, gears and chain, which one of his Sedona galleries calls "Poseidon."
The critters pages also held sea turtles, scorpions, dragonflies, praying mantises, a copepod, a roadrunner, coyotes, bears, a penguin, a robot dog, a robot dude and a helicopter.
The plates
