About Clayton
(AKA Domestic Cowboy)

When Clayton McIntosh first arrived in Japan, he hated the awful “photocopiers” at the schools where he worked. As an Assistant Language Teacher on the JET Programme, his days often involved copying hundreds, sometimes thousands, of worksheets. The machines never worked properly. They jammed, misaligned, streaked ink, and produced results that felt broken and unpredictable.

One day, an artist friend laughed at his pain and told him they were not photocopiers at all. They were Risographs, and you just had to embrace the flaws. People used them to make art. Within seconds, like Neo learning kung fu in The Matrix, he understood and that conversation started an obsession.

Back in Australia, access to Risograph printing was almost impossible. Machines were rare, expensive, and far outside his budget. After years of searching, Clayton bought one for $200 off some shady print shop, only to find it was beyond repair. Not long after, an eBay alert appeared. A primary school was giving away a Risograph that had been sitting unused for fifteen years. And with some tinkering and a lot of patience, he brought it back to life.

At the same time, Clayton was developing his illustration style. Influenced by Japan, shaped by years working in educational resources, and refined through graphic design, his work became playful, naive, and slightly surreal.

Today, Clayton works primarily with Risograph printing. He sketches ideas by hand, refines them digitally, then prints them layer by layer. Ink misaligns. Marks are left behind. Colours behave unpredictably. Every print ends up slightly different, and that uniqueness is the work itself.

More recently, his prints have been exploring more personal struggles and themes of power and control, expectations, life and death, and his Christian faith.

Please follow along on the journey, collect prints, cherish them and find joy in the unique, imperfect, art of Domestic Cowboy.