One of my most recent hobbies has been reverse-painting abstract art on plexiglass. Reverse-painting involves laying the paint down on one side of the plexiglass and viewing it on the other. The advantage of this is that the colors come out a perfectly uniform texture and look very slick. Unfortunately, it's very hard to blend colors well, it's tough to do small details, and once you put the paint down, you can't simply paint over it like you can with regular canvas. One distinct advantage of reverse painting is that you can create wildly fantastic backdrops for clouds, water, grass, etc., simply by dabbing your finger in a few different colors of paint and smearing them onto the plexiglass. The sky and swirling clouds in Comet 63 use such a technique. Unlike any other art media, plexiglass can be heated and formed. Taking advantage of this moldability will be "Desertscape" with one melted corner that is folded over to help convey the feeling of intense heat. Unfortunately, the colors here are sometimes a bit too dark to be entirely accurate-- they are actually a bit brighter (adjusting your brightness ~50% and contrast ~100% may help).

"Comet 60" 8"x6": Acrylic on plexiglass, the very first plexiglass art I painted. The "Comet xx" series starts at 60 and will gradually continue upward, but I don't know how far!	"Comet 61" 8"x6": Acrylic on plexiglass. Second in the "Comet" series. It's sometimes difficult to see the contrast between the purple and brown in this picture, especially if your brightness isn't turned up a lot.
"Comet 62" 16"x11": Acrylic on a glass pane. It's very difficult to get acrylics to stick to glass well. I think I'll have to stay with plexiglass.	"Comet 63" 16"x12": Acrylic on plexiglass. The detail in this work is pretty intense, owing to a couple of new techniques I invented that only work well for reverse-painting.
"Skywalk" 8"x6": Acrylic on plexiglass. One of my personal favorites so far. The contrast between the colors is very rich.	"The Underwater House of Dr. Seuss" 12"x8": Acyrlic on plexiglass. A house scene-- underwater!
"Cloud Splitter" 8"x6": Acrylic on plexiglass.	"Jacob's Ladder" 12"x6.5": Acrylic and glitter on plexiglass. Day and night seem torn asunder by the bridge between Heaven and earth. The white dots on the left side are actually glitter.
"Rustic Flag" 8"x6": Acrylic on plexiglass.	"Ocean Sun" 8"x6": Acrylic and spray paint on plexiglass. The bright white spot is actually the camera flash.
"Earthscape" 24"x12": Acrylic on plexglass. (white spot is the camera flash)	"The Ubiquitous Verge of Impending Disintegration" 24"x12": Acrylic on plexglass.
"Wind Chimes and Meteors" 24"x12": Acrylic on plexiglass. A stunning work using a lot of eye-catching (and expensive!) cobalt blue contrasted with a luminous, fluid orange. The meteors streak in to throw off the stillness of the scene.	"Festival" 12"x1.4": Acrylic on plexiglass. Festival has a small hole at one end and is intended to be hung by a nail. It throws a compact splash of color on any wall. Another view.
"Fibonacci Nautilus #1" 24"x12": Acrylic on canvas. Uses the Fibonacci sequnce {0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55}, where each size of the square is the number in the sequence in centimeters, i.e. 1x1, 1x1, 2x2, 3x3, 5x5, etc. If it went on infinitely, the result would be a rectangle with an aspect ratio of ( sqrt(5) - 1 ) / 2 = ~0.618339, the magical number which forms such things as the "golden ratio" as well as many aspects of nature.	"Fibonacci Nautilus #2" 24"x12": Acrylic on canvas. Like #1, but using bright colors, including an expensive tube of bright cadmium orange.
"Atavistic Landscape" 24"x16": Acrylic on plexiglass. A bizarre scene where the character of the sky is inherited from the colorful foreground and vice versa. Uses the stunning cobalt blue and bright cadmium orange and yellow.
In the works: Desertscape Ergodic Entropy Persistent Phantasmagoric Phosphene at Midnight Computeric Nickelodeon useful words: somnolent (slumber), inexorable (persistent), totem (esteemed symbol), melancholy, reticent (tacit), luminous, surreptitious (clandestine), atavistic (inherited),

Creating these paintings is generally done as follows:
1. mask off the borders-- they will be painted last.
2. mask off any major curve areas and trace the curve onto the masking tape with a pencil to ensure it looks right.
3. cut the pencil line with an Xacto knife and peel back one side of the tape to form a smooth curve.
4. paint the exposed plexiglass being careful to make sure the paint is thick enough to keep most light out (ensures a good uniform color application). Wait for this paint to dry at least partially.
5. lightly score the paint (yes the paint!) at the masking tape border if you are using acrylics, because pulling the tape up tends to pull up the paint that's already on the plexiglass. This makes small details tough.
6. carefully pull up the other side of the mask and paint that area. Continually check your painting as you work by holding it up to a light to ensure that the paint is covering all areas.
7. for blending colors, you basically have to take your starting color and add a very small amount of the color to blend to, mix it, and apply it. Repeat until you have reached the other color. I often use my finger for blends, (especially when I did the yellow/green/blue line in Comet 63), since it's faster and sometimes smoother.

These paintings may be available for sale on request. Email me for details.

Art lamps have always intrigued me, so I started building my own. The two wooden ones below are hewned out of solid white oak and contain around 25 Light-Emitting Diodes each, which are strung in series with a resistor and run straight from the 125VAC line. "Comet" uses all red LED's, and "Harlequin" uses red, orange, yellow, green and blue LED's. They are actually turned on in the pictures, but the flash makes that hard to see. They are great "mood lamps" in the dark. The "Neon Candle" in the bottom picture is a nifty helical neon lamp I bought for $2 hooked up to a step down transformer, an inverter, and a current limiting potentiometer all inside the black tube (This item was sold, 5/24/02). This makes the brightness variable and produces in neat orange glow. Right now, you could talk me into selling them if the price was right. The cubes took me about 6 hours each.

"Comet" Red LED's in a solid white Oak cube. 2001

"Harlequin" Rainbow LED's in a solid white Oak shaped cube. 2001

"Neon Candle" Helical orange neon bulb with variable brightness, 1997

Cool Stuff
• Cruciblestudio.com, my aunt and uncle's art studio in Montana, where they specialize in metal work and digital art.
• Salvador Dali Font zip file-- this is one cool font!!
• dali-gallery.com with nearly every one of his works.
• Maverick Creations nifty clocks!
• Greentree Creations exquisite wood work.
• Chimes/parts