First Place. Best of Show. Del Norte County Fair, 2024.
Most tables hold your coffee. This one holds fifty animals — and some of them only show up in the dark.
Pyrography is drawing with fire
No paint. No ink. No stain. In pyrography, the image is burned directly into the wood with a heated tip, which means every line is permanent the instant it is made. There is no undo. Nothing gets erased, and nothing gets painted over. A slip doesn't get corrected — it either gets lived with, or the piece gets abandoned.
That is what separates a large hand-burned work from a printed one. The risk compounds with every hour of work already invested, right up to the final line.
Fifty animals, if you can find them
The surface holds fifty animals worked into a single composition. Most people pick out a handful straight away. Then they keep looking, and the count keeps climbing. It is the kind of piece guests end up standing over, arguing about whether that shape is a fox or a hare.
Then you turn on a blacklight
Under ultraviolet light, the table stops being the artwork you thought it was. Elements invisible in daylight come alive, and a second design surfaces inside the first.
It is, in practice, two artworks occupying one object — one for the day, one for the night. Photographs of it only ever tell you half the story, which is exactly the point.
Why there is only one
This piece took both First Place and Best of Show at the 2024 Del Norte County Fair — judged against a field of work from across the county.
It will not be reproduced. There is no print run, no second edition, no smaller version in another colourway. Original hand-burned work cannot be reissued the way a printed design can. When it sells, that is the end of it.
More original work
The same hand and the same blacklight technique turn up in the Octopus Conk — an octopus burned into a natural conk, where the raw material is already a different shape before a single line is drawn. No two can match, even in principle.
Both live in The Local Art Spot, the corner of the shop kept for original work rather than printed goods.