Art With Tools | Andrew Myers & Walton Creel.

Andrew Myers creates 3D portraits using thousands of screws.

When I think of art, I imagine an artist working out of their sun filled studio space, wearing a colourful bohemian outfit, complete with a hat or even a cravat, a paintbrush in one hand with a palette in the other, their face showing traces of colour pigment etc. The last thing I imagine is an artist drilling a ‘canvas’ with screws and power-tools, or better still – shooting a gun to create art. Blimey! What the hell happened? Was I asleep and missed a memo on art becoming something blokes do out of their backyard sheds?

Seriously though, who would have thought that guns and power-tools could create such beautiful pieces? Now, these guys certainly don’t operate out of some shed – they a proper grown up artists who do amazing things with tools and firearms. Meet Andrew Myers and Walton Creel.

Andrew Myers is a California-based artist who goes through a multi-step process to create incredible works of art. He starts with a plywood panel base, on top of which he places pages of a phone book. He then draws a face, followed by pre-drills 8,000 to 10,000 holes by hand. As he drills in the screws, Myers doesn’t rely on computer software to guide him – he figures it out along the way as he creates a 3D quality with his artworks by sinking screws at different depths. Ummm… wow.

Andrew Myers shoots his gun to create art. No seriously, he does.

Walton Creel is creating an ongoing series of works titled ‘Deweaponizing the Gun’. This is what he has to say about his work:

When I decided I wanted to make art using a gun, I was not sure what direction I would have to take. I knew I did not want to use it simply as an accent to work I was doing, but as the focus. My main goal was to take the destructive power away from the gun. To manipulate the gun into a tool of creation and use it in a way that removed it from its original purpose, to deweaponize it.

During my first experiment I came across the concept of creating an image hole by hole on a surface. I also figured out that canvas would be too stressed by the process of a rifle firing many bullets into it. I moved on to aluminum and, with further experimentation, I figured out exactly how far apart my shots needed to be and that moving beyond .22 caliber was simply too destructive. When the aluminum was painted beforehand, the blast of the gun knocked off a tiny amount of paint around each hole, which helped fuse the image together.

 

Crazy cool-town extreme love or what?

[Image credits // © Andrew Myers, found thanks to My Modern Met. // © Walton Creel found thanks to Today and Tomorrow.]