Celtic Art and Retro - Futuristic Design

It sounds like an anchovy and jelly sandwich, doesn't it? But it's sooo much tastier. All my favorite art goes here.

Celtic Art Books

My own personal bookstore, chock full of Celtic art borders that you can use, and some handsome blank books with bordered pages.



Saga Shirts

At Saga Shirts, we make Celtic art the way it wasn't meant to be made. Then we put it on black shirts. You want some.



Retropolis Transit Authority

Colorful, high quality tees and jerseys imprinted with the cheerful advertising slogans of yesterday's tomorrows, along with thoughtful and humorous retro-futuristic art.

Ars Celtica

Ars Celtica offers customizable business cards along with postcards, greeting cards, coffee & travel mugs, and more.

The Retropolis Travel Bureau

Pick up some customizable retro futuristic business cards, postcards, or greeting cards - and a souvenir mug!

 

The Retrovert

Restored Vintage graphics from WPA poster art, the 1939 New York World's Fair, Crate Label Art, Magazine Covers, and more - now on a selection of cards, posters, shirts, and coffee mugs.

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News from the Secret Laboratory:

    As Winter circles above like the buzzards in Ice Age II (which is to say "with Busby-Berkeley style"), I've been at work on two separate projects of relative giganto-hugeness.

    One's a retro-futuristic epic; the other's a collection of Celtic knotwork patterns for use in print or on, well, just about anything.

Volume 1 - now available Celtic Knotwork Borders in Repeating Sections (Paperback) $19.95

    The Celtic art book - part pattern book and part clip art collection - has some features that I think make it unique, and I hope that visitors to my clip art pages may enjoy it. The designs in the book are all presented as repeating sections so that they can be used to build out borders in whatever size you need, and all of the designs have both straight and curved versions. Any of them can be used either as rectangular borders or as rings.

Tanglewood Celtic Art Blank Book (Lined) $15.75

    Volume 1 is now available, after several intense and winter-confined months. I'm really pleased with it and my hope is that you will be, too.

    It's available at my new Celtic Art Books store - where I've also put together some nice softbound blank books with border designs on all the pages. A friend of mine describes this little bookstore as "Hellishly Snazzy", which is a phrase I wish I'd made up myself. See what you think!

    The other project ("Empire State Patrol") is so large I have to avoid thinking about how large it is, which I just now failed to do, and it'll be ready, you know, when it's ready. When there's something solid to show you it'll be appearing on its very own web site which already looks pretty neat even if there are still gaping and important holes in its content. You'll have to take my word on that; you can't see it yet.

It's all About Me:

    I always thought that I'd be a writer. It was a bit of a shock when, sometime in the middle 1970's, I realized that I was spending all my time making pictures. For the most part I've been doing that ever since.

    Back in those days there weren't a heck of a lot of options for artists, so while I drew and painted and even sold my paintings I also did advertising art and designs for businesses, painted signs, did some illustration for publishers and small music labels, and worked for awhile as a draftsman.

    Computers started to get awfully interesting in the late 1980s. I began to do freelance work for computer game companies, founded one, foundered it, and moved on to making and directing art at a series of game development houses. Several have been shot out from under me.

     I went through a long spell in which was keenly interested in Celtic art - the sort of abstract decorative design that we call "Celtic Knotwork" or "Celtic Interlace". Both my grandmothers came from Irish-American families, so that's my excuse.

     But more recently I've been exploring what I call "The Future That Never Was" - that is, it's all about the future that folks who read too much Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers thought they'd live to see; or maybe it's the future foreseen by the 1939 New York Worlds Fair.

     This seems to have started with my love for the music of the 20's and 30's, but grew into an interest in the Depression era, and from that, to the sort of better futures that people in that terrible time hoped to see.

     What touches me about those visions is the universality of them. People hoped not so much for personal prosperity, but rather for a world in which everyone would be better off. A world where breadlines and apple sellers would be replaced by hovercars and autogyros. At a time when 25% of America's population was unemployed it just wasn't enough for any one person to do better - the world needed to be remade.

    Many of those bits of the future have been invented and achieved, but we do seem to have missed out on that aspect of universality. Not to mention the personal rocket ships, which, personally, I'm still a little peeved about.
 
    Lately I've taken a walk away from the games business and I've settled down in a little harbor town in northeastern Ohio.

    My role model used to be Philip Marlowe, but I've mellowed with age: now it's Doc from "Cannery Row".