mike burnett

Strange as it sounds, tinkering was not always admired. During much of the Middle Ages, in fact, tinkering was considered a disease, a sort of "lust of the eyes." Artists who labored nightly over creative curiosities in atrabilious basements were often said to have sold their souls to the devil for useless skills.

It was after this time that the twentieth-century Toledo native, Mike Burnett, was sent down the street by his mother to take art lessons from an elderly Belgian painter. Here the budding virtuoso mastered still lives of empty liquor bottles and stinky old boots. Burnett later studied at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green and the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland and was one of the first Ohioans to lecture on taxidermy, cardboard and the doodle. He devoted himself to freelance illustration, architectural model building, graphic design, areology, baseball, action figures, trigonometry, indie comics, movies and cheeses of other cultures.

So who is Mike Burnett? He is arguably the world's twenty-seventh great tinkerer of moveable, wooden, toy-like sculptures and perhaps can even be accused of inventing characters for his own amusement. Some question whether he really undertakes his craft at all with one wife, three children, two dogs and a full time job at a major greeting card conglomerate. Burnett was recently named "Father of Little Wooden Figurines" by the International Society of Comparative Woods and continues paving the way for ground-breaking tinkering of succeeding generations.
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