Idea was a "Behind the Scenes Look" parody spotlighting cast & crew members from the show. In this case the Irate Pilot of the wrecked space car the Heavy Rescue 411 crew are contracted to clean up.
By the Ganymede Station Transportation Administration at an hourly rate, billed back to the accident claimee. It isn't cheap, and guess what: They get an hour for lunch every day, paid. Including while cleaning up your mess, Sir. Or are you rated to go mop up all that explosive monomethyl hydrazine yourself? Didn't think so.
The trouble he got into. Imprudent speed in unsafe conditions. Methane blizzard, could have been a lot lot worse. Everyone needs to learn to just slow down.
Long/short is that we have a new parody make believe TV show idea to have fun with. Debated on which blog to go over this on as there's as much art content as space bling worship. But it's about those plastic ships right now, the painting to follow. Usually it's worked the other way, starting with a more or less finished painted box that needed something inside to tell a story. This time it started as finding an idea large enough to snugly fill the void-like expanse of a much larger area than my standard 4x4 inch size.
Not sure about the text but want a "splash screen" with the make believe show's name, will refine it. Depicts an accident scene involving a somewhat rare Gilmark Toys hard plastic space car in a severely damaged state I'd obtained for a few dollars more. Held onto it knowing I wanted to utilize its still respected hull in a creative manner ... We just happened to have one of those Heavy Machine Rescue type shows on during supper, where guys up in Canada wearing brightly colored foil suits pull wrecked tractor trailers out of the snow? and bingo.
The box work as originally plotted out, painting just there at this stage to suggest an off-world location. Box is a 10x20 inch cheese collection gift crate from the late Uncle Michael. Best idea I'd come up with was to make a crater (at right) with plasticine that a likewise broken but handsomely painted Marx Toys space tank could traverse down to meet up with a painted Marx astronaut.
Groovy idea, but what of it? I like it when the arrangement suggests a little story, the more absurd the better. And the only rule is that the painting has to be as cool as whatever goes into the box or you're just flappin air. Craft table bling priced $50 or less, maybe clickbait eye-candy for people to "Like" on social media. Pass. Set it aside for a month & worked on other things.
Mayhem. Now we have a story to tell, and much more to fill in starting with finishing the painted scene. Needs a space heliocopter or wreckage hauling garbage ship in the sky over the tank, suspended by wire etc. The terrain will be more terraformed and scattered with debris from the mishap. And I want to paint the crashed ship with a stainless steel iridescent acrylic that looks like metal. Not like I could mess it up any further.
Are we having fun yet?
What I'm after. My dad is hooked on these shows, and will gleefully watch two or more episodes a day if allowed. He admires how it stars essential workers who modestly go about difficult tasks in bone-chilling, dangerous conditions for basic pay. No false heroes being celebrated, just guys who go home to their families at the end of the day. Sit in a chair, maybe have a warm meal.
I used to hate it, and still cannot discern between the two or three shows if its kind that feature into our routine programming here at Camp Nyland. I believe they are produced by the Weather Channel? and all have that same narrator whose voice has become more frequently heard in our house than music. Or at least upstairs on B Deck where my painting area is.I hear that guy booming on all the time, and when the inspiration hit I felt it was time to respond in kind: "Just go for it, snarky media parody and all." Cross-topic interest with the potential of a new audience who follow the show and want artworks involving work crews cleaning up after rocket accidents ... I have a lot of broken space ships in my boxes of stuff set aside to feature in artworks. Consider this warming up a new trope.
Our pilot at right in gold, a Gumdrop Alien cyborg by LP Toys of Hong Kong. That's his spouse in orange begging him to please get down from there, same toy line. Assorted astronauts by Giant Plastics, Multiple Toymakers, Airfix, and LP Toys, all painted with acrylics by Golden's. Dutch angle closeups like these can be printed + framed, or projected, enlarged, traced, painted into, and become their own flat 2d artworks. Kind of a nice angle to work from right there.
Which wasn't easily arrived at. Total time invested could be rounded down to three months of stop/go work over two years. First the elements had to be found, some of which I've had since 2019. The figures and space tank had to be selected from that stash and painted. Then the box selected & its terrain begun, the prior idea with the space tank worked on for about a month. Then the inspiration of the wrecked ship had to present itself, along with an hour or so excitedly fumbling up the collection of elements shown. Another hour taking pix, several more sorting them, modifying them, and writing up the post. Other things were created during that time span as well so it's not like this was a sole focus.
Drydock at Ganymede Station, one of our commercial and industrial hubs on Jupiter's largest moon Ganymede, where forward bases to explore Saturn's life-rich water moons were established. Current population is about 22,000 mostly made up of industrial workers, miners, refinery crews and the support staff needed to provide lodgings and recreation for a small city's worth of humans. Which fifty years on is a mix of both Terrestrial colonists and Out Worlders who have never set foot on Earth.
One thing is for sure: My astronauts are always in trouble. One misadventure after another.
Three minute upload outlining the project including choice of box and other strange tales. Had a great brainstorm session and turned it into content - Post here on what I call my Space Blog with more pix and some of my thought process on the early conception here. Features the same video as above.
Some of the original 1960s toy line that the painted figure is based on, manufactured by Multiple Products Company (MPC) from 1962 to 1984 or so. Had em as a kid, finding some were a priority. My favorite is the Sentry at far right with the Soozaphone held up to his helmet. Would that work in a vacuum?
This figure a copy from the 1990s I painted and he needs a very special housing. Click the image to see more!
So how was the pandemic? I thought I was going to refurb the blog back there in 2021, still hanging onto the vestiges of what came before. Then some crazy person decided they didn't want to stop being president or something like that? horrible nightmares about people hurting other people for ridiculous reasons. Blanked out on purpose, resurfacing only now in May of 2023 a changed man awed by magic and loss.
Visiting Grand Teton National Park, July 1976
Still working the found object diorama angle with the vintage toy pieces and lots of terraforming with acrylics. This series utilizing 1:87 scale Volkswagen bus vehicles as a metaphor for our family unit, traveling across this great country seeing things many only read about. Such a lucky childhood had we, and young adulthood. And most of adulthood, with things picking up nicely around 2009 when I found my artistic voice again. Several years of hard work later found me directing my own gallery at a pinnacle venue for the Central New York Arts Continuum, for five years. Last show was incredible, will find some pictures to finally share up. We had so many incredible shows, so proud of all we managed to do there with so many talented and hard working people.
Visiting the Yellowstone Hot Springs, July 1978
All of which ended in March of 2020 when COVID came to town. Our venue closed indefinitely. I relocated back home to help my elderly parents weather whatever the End of the World was going to be like. I needed to know every day with my own eyes how they were. Phone calls would not suffice. Departed the studio life in Utica NY to shack up in my dad's basement with the spiders, my life in storage.
Which actually wasn't all that bad as long as you had no inclination to go anywhere. Full quarantine for almost three years with grocery deliveries, claustrophobia, endless Syracuse weather, crazy people on the news doing crazier things every day. We got rid of the spiders. Plenty of time to paint or just sit with mom, help my dad as much as he allowed me to. Which pretty much accounts for March 2020 thru November 2022. I hardly remember a thing.
Visiting Two Lights State Park with the Carter's, July 1979
Last winter was impossible, filled with terror and heartbreak which I will speak of in further updates: I need this blog now. The world really did end, and we must craft & rebuild anew. Healing will take a generation and I am a changed man in many ways. But I don't want my old life back, I want a better one, and this is how we start.
Still in my dad's basement though now that's where I choose to be, and my what a difference that can make. I won't leave him to it, and he respects my dedication to my arts quest even if not maybe understanding it. I paint every day and its the strongest work I've yet produced, craft level now very smooth. At night I work on my webs or edit video, maybe play some Quake II. Would like to teach a class about ALIEN, write about art for real, show my paintings to new audiences, and maybe have a gallery to manage once again.
Will be back with more as it happens, and it will. We're good.
Most recent upload YouTube as of this time, discussing current art strategies.
Please do bookmark & subscribe to my channel! all sorts of cool stuff to see, will keep it coming.
New alternate email address is space.trucks1138@ gmail.com
That's Camp Nyland, February 2021 in Syracuse NY. Snowdrift on the picnic table is a passive nature-based sculpture I've been observing all winter, and am eager to see it melt. The COVID 2020 hijinx sent me running from Utica NY back to Syracuse fulltime: Need to have two sets of eyes on my 80+ year old parents every day even if they be my own. Had to choose between waiting out last spring's lockdown here or there and it didn't take much time to decide. Was finally able to move everything back to Syracuse in October and have indeed been making art all the while. The Tech Garden functioned on skeleton staff for nearly all of 2020 and I have not been queried about new show ideas thus far (and have a few in mind for someone, somewhere).
So here we are with little to do but wait, my parents on their 2nd shots next week and I should get mind round about the same time the Herd Immunity kicks in -- Just what I expected, though I will be surprised if life actually does return to "normal" so soon. We did a show about The End of the World at The Tech Garden summer 2018, and were sadly more correct that we thought. The one happy thought is that at the time I'd concluded there's no way our consumer driven society could come to an "end" in the traditional sense of the words. It'd take a swift kick to its collective gonads but walk it off, sort out priorities, and address them. We continue, sadly having lost way too many in a collective tragedy that has left me numb & not knowing what to say until I was ready.
My priority has been making art and I found my groove last year when utilizing space toy forms to overcome my issue with rendering skills. Now I don't have to, and am finally crafting the "playsets" as static diorama like paintings enclosed in assorted boxes. Here's some in varying states of completion.
Boxes are 4x4 inches, all acrylics by Golden's and the space figures all pre-1980. There's something about the vintage forms in particular which fascinates me. "Retro-Futurism", using the forms of the past to draw a possible vision of the future. I also try to only use generic figures -- No Han Solo! or other branded franchise characters, the painting automatically becomes about that character, its franchise and its fan's expectations.
Some of the boxes are planets, some are seascapes, one is a city and my favorites are the swamps & marshes. It's the same objectives to the painting as the Frog Ponds were c.2018, with the focus on use of materials and "surfacing" rather than sketching out a landscape. The substances accrete over a period of weeks, and these figures won't necessarily go into these boxes.
I'd rather be using figures I fabricate myself but even a 3d printer would be an investment beyond current means (including a new computer which could run the software) let alone even a basic casting set with centrifuge (!!!). So for the time being I'm using other people's space people and their vintage pedigree is part of the formula, favored companies being non-character figures by Marx Toys, MPC / Multiple Toymakers, Tim Mee Toys, LP / Lik Be Plastics & Metal, and anonymously made copies thereof. I also try to only paint figures which have damage, are visibly playworn, or copies of dubious ancestry that a "real collector" wouldn't care about -- Those are the best! And the disclaimer rule is that No vintage space toys are harmed in the creation of my artwork! Five minutes under a hot water faucet with a toothbrush and they are clean. It's acrylics on plastics so the trick is keeping the paint on the figures.
Display could be on a shelf or hanging, and to make sure the bottoms of the boxes aren't blank I made more of the planet.
Moon
Marsh
Ganymede
Self Portrait
Volcano
Bog
Urban Hipster Space Turtle
Some sort of dispute over parking ...
Chance Encounter
Lost in the Space Swamp
The Lovely Dr. Chandra Lakes, and her ingenious Plutonium Energizer Module. The power of which, in the wrong hands, could destroy entire worlds ...
Crackle Paste, Glass Bead Gel, Clear Granular Gel, Cobalt Blue, Green Gold Fluid Acrylics, Iridescent Acrylic Blue Green and Pearl, buckets of Micaceous Iron Oxide, Matte Heavy Gel Medium and Clear Tar Gel (love it!!), Pyrrole Orange Fluid Acrylic and Cadmium Orange Red for space suits, Iridescent Copper Light Fluid and Iridescent Copper Fine in full body for priming the plastic figures (the bits of ground up metallic looking stuff sticks better), Iridescent Stainless Steel for gritty "used universe" metallic surfaces, Bone Black Fluid Acrylic for darkening tones, Carbon Black Fluid Acrylic for outlines, Indian Yellow Hue Fluid Acrylic for that Martian sky, and cotton wadding for volcano ejecta or atmospheric inversion. Just in case you were wondering what I'd used. Boxes nicked off Amazon at 12 for $25. Go Fish.
