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!
Mom in her favorite spot! She's watching, always. Holy mackerel do I have to be on my best behavior like never before. Am taking a cue from Yoda's lesson to Luke Skywalker - She is in the rock, the tree, the squirrels and deer who make our grounds their own. The Force binds us all in a way that transcends mortality. We will always remain connected.
Collaging with mom, dated on the back June 1974. Hangs on the wall in my room; Note early indication of Lunar Module obsession, using photographs, and appreciation of plastic figures. That football helmet in pajamas rocks, and the monochrome baby picture is believed to be Flora herself. Just incredible.
Some music for mom below, obscure early Genesis single with Peter Gabriel. Flora always loved the sound of acoustic guitars, made sure I had one to learn to play well enough for her to listen from downstairs. This is one I'd have figured out how to play along with any day, rain or shine, up or down. Flute part too.
"Happy the Man", Genesis 1972. Apologies for any forced ads!
Garden Party, Flora Nyland 2021, 32 x 24 inches, acrylics and pastel on canvas.
Mom's last completed painting, in the collection of the Artist's son. Flora was more active as a silkscreen printmaker and later photographer but always had a renowned gift for painting, line, color and texture. Our house is tastefully filled with marvelous pantings, prints, photographs and collage works she created dating back to the 1950s. If you sift through prior blog entries over to the right there's coverage of her artworks, our magical visit to the Golden Foundation summer 2014, and other items related to mom's lively creative spirit.
Figure Study, Flora Nyland 1963, 8 x 20 inches, oil on canvas.
Collection of the Family
Detail from the above. Figure to the left believed to be a self portrait image.
Mary Poppins, Flora Nyland 1964, 23 x 50 inches, oil with collage on wood.
Oneonta, Flora Nyland 1965 32 x 60 inches, oil on canvas.
Flora was also an accomplished academician, directing the SUNY ESF Archives at F. Franklin Moon Library for almost thirty years. She earned a Master's in Information Sciences and curating the Fletcher Steel collection of materials related to the SUNY relationship with industrialists Anna and Archer Huntington. Their marvelous 1900s era wildlife preserve now serves as SUNY ESF's Adirondack field campus where my father conducted his research work. I got to see the dedication she poured into project firsthand, incredible photographs and print works dating back prior to 1900. Mom was a badass when it came to information studies.
Rabbits, Flora Nyland 1975, 12 x 26 overall, 8x10 silkscreen block with print.
Shelf #2, Flora Nyland 2013, 3 x 3 inches, pen and watercolor on canvas.
Flora taught art in the early 1970s at what was then Syracuse's Central Tech downtown on East Adams Street, and worked as a volunteer at the Everson Museum on Harrison St. for many years. She always felt right at home visiting our gallery at The Tech Garden, knew exactly where she was. Mom made sure I had a chance to at least try to pursue a career in the visual arts, and my Forever vow to her was to continue with the work she helped me to begin.
Commencement, Syracuse University Carrier Dome, Mother's Day 1991. Pix by my dad using a disposable camera, love how the flowers are in focus.
Kirkland Art Center, Clinton NY January 11 2016
The artwork from above, one of my "Dutch Interior" series at 27 x 60 inches, acrylics and pastel on luan door. Made as her Mother's Day card for May 2016. Tried to fill it with items she could peer at and think about in a human scale. Having her get to see it in a spectacular gallery exhibit in Kirkland (with artists Tony Thompson and Timothy Rand) was a wish delivered -- Mom got to see it on the big wall.
Photobombing Flora on her birthday, July 2019. Flora was born on July 7th 1937, and one of my favorite memories is how she took us to the little post office in Newcomb NY on her birthday in 1977. While growing up the family would visit SUNY ESF's Newcomb Campus a couple times every summer, where my father Ralph Nyland maintained his research plots. So on July 7 1977 she piles us three bratty boys into the family Volkswagen bus to drive into town to sit in the driveway of their little Post Office, which at that time was about the size of the Frozen Custard stand next door.
We all went into the post office and each of the three boys were allowed to pick out four or five postcards to mail to various family or friends from afar. All of which would be datestamped 7/7/77 (or 7 7 1977) when canceled, and the genius of it struck home. How absolutely cool. Would give anything to track down one of those cards.
That's actually Aunt Holly's Thanksgiving bouquet from 2020, but it's a gorgeous enough arrangement to give it up again as a virtual Mother's Day Special. Love ya, Mom!!
https://spacetrucks.blogspot.com/ is the other blog feed on this Toys As Art project. I'm regarding it as the Culture Of Collecting part of the project where I share the space bling I've collected + what I've been able to learn about it with both other collectors and casual space rockers.
The Dude, or my "Major Tom", 54mm with fitted helmet, 1952. I have other Major Toms too.
I came up with the name Space.Trucks as a descriptive term for the kind of stuff I'm drawn to, usually work related space age ground vehicles. Old archaic looking helicopters too, and Cold War era space adventurers who eventually ditched the ray guns & atom bombs for cameras and sample collection sticks. The crew of my favorite film ALIEN from 1979 are also often referred to as Space Truckers working a huge hauling rig resembling the inside of a B-52 bomber. And that's cool.
Lido Toys Captain Video & Futureman figures with a section of tin litho space port wall from a playset for the line concocted by T. Cohn Superior in 1952. On my Bucket List.
The Space Trucks posts are usually about the older toy forms I've found inspiration from, with lots of pictures and usually a video upload where I open up the arriving box as an ongoing performance art project. I checked, it's valid: Opening your mail on camera counts as performance art, or it can. I try to mix the procedure up with pop culture clips or other non-sequitor distractions to result in an enjoyable viewing experience even for those who do not share the enthusiasm. I strongly feel that art should be fun, when appropriate, or at least enjoyable.
Short subject upload from my YouTube introducing Kellogg's absurd alien robot names for the Lido characters from a 1955 Corn Flakes promotion.
I also wanted to note that my goal is to usually work these posts as shorter subject fare rather than long rambling hyperbole about esoteric personal interests. But right now we're sort of unloading 3+ years of content that accumulated during the time spent helping to care for Mom and did not have much room for sharing my creative energies beyond basic social media, let alone in gallery type settings.
So some of what's turning up right now is admittedly breathless from having waited so long to be told. I am enjoying having that pressure vent off at last!! and looking forward to working both blogs like a remote job of some kind, with brevity and humor always being my objective.
Painting from 2020 using a larger Lido "Futureman" figure as an outline for the old Larry Rivers routine. Worked on it with Mom at our dining room table studio during the height of the pandemic. Unfinished, 32x24 pastel and acrylics on canvas board.
It took four years to complete a set of one each of their possible twelve poses, during which I learned all I could about the company which made them, the show they promoted, and other forms of that era.
Here's today's Culture of Collection item from the Space Trucks blog featuring my favorite of the pioneering early 1950s space bling, Lido Toy's insane Captain Video and his Video Rangers mayhem 1952 - 1955.
We share it here hoping it can provide some quasi-academic grounding for how this project came about, trying to help others understand the form and spread the collecting culture among like minded geeks the world over.
How about that for a big painting, 5x12 feet or so, either on canvas or as a mural. Like a big busy Hieronymous Bosch crowd scene with these jabbering creatures waving their arms excitedly. Using my painterly edge in acrylics, working the surface textures, weird details and pop cartoon colors. All I need is a projector to trace the outlines and enough room to swing a hammer while building the stretcher.
Current box paintings being finalized. Found some gallery representation and have a mid July deadline to get a crate of artworks together for an out of town venue. Will show you how it comes together.
And YES! Blogging from Camp Nyland here just outside of Syracuse NY where it is May, it is spring, and we can sit outside without survival gear. Today it's even warm and dry so making the most of it. To the right there are small sculptural forms from an incredible Foundry Workshop at the COMART Facility in 1989 with Roger Mack, Roger Bisbing, I think Clark Stallworth was there too. Just student stuff but I poured bronze for two weeks and it ruled.
On about this one today, begun December 2020 (?) called The Bristol Box, 4x4x3 inches on a plain wood craft box from Amazon. Usually used for potting plants out on the terrace or gluing decorations for a jellybean container. Now finally resolved & ready for hangers.
Inspired by the woodland area home of the Bristol family out there in Fayetteville where we used to visit as kids. Not so much a gated community but a series of modernesque homes set in a ring of woods which had a little drainage pond and creek that always impressed me.
I like letting the painting expand onto the side so the box takes on a kind of objectness. In that sense it's also difficult to display in just a picture or two, so we do blogs.
I presume display on walls so the world should continue onto the underside as well, and I like the trope of a pond or pool spilling over with a little waterway that collects.
Backside left bare for hangars on the top edge. I even sign them now, so this one not quite ready to go just yet.
A new method I stumbled upon when making my skies is to layer a thickness of Clear Tar Gel over the Micaceous Iron Oxide Fluid Acrylic I use for the night sky. Here's a side panel before the CTG treatment.
And after. The glass clear layer acts as a sort of lens and warps the light being bounced off the tiny bits of ground up mica.
The other outer side panel with starfield in plain Micaceous Iron Oxide.
And again after the layering of Clear Tar Gel.
I'd like to go there and just sit for a while.
...
I've come to think of these box artworks as a set of nine tiny paintings which have to both work together and hopefully work on their own as individual gestures. Am proud of this painting, which if memory serves has a 4 x 2.5 inch dimension.
Layering on the Clear Tar Gel, and you can see how it's more or less impossible to get a perfectly flat even coating. It's the little ripples and curves which cause the slight magnifying effect -- Stumbled upon completely by chance!
Ripples and curves in the dried Clear Tar Gel creating a lens effect that varies from patch to patch.
The sky for the main panel here has not yet been treated with the Clear Tar Gel, and you can see how the reflected light off the mica is dazzling the fone's camera.
I love drainage ditches or retention ponds, and want the painting to look like it might be wet or leak on the floor. And suggest a hybrid between painting and ceramics, so that it look like it might have been baked in an oven.
The pool is like 19+ layers of Clear Tar Gel, Glass Bead Gel, Iridescent Fluid Blue and Green, Cobalt Blue Fluid Acrylic, Manganese Blue Hue Fluid Acrylic, more Glass Bead Gel, and more Clear Tar Gel, to create a visibly deep pool that the eye looks into and has a bottom. You could dive into it.
Usually I finish off the artworks with some little figures I painted, maybe a vehicle or space craft they got stuck in the mud etc. I do like how they suggest a sense of scale here, but decided the orange suits did not stand out from the terrain.
Nice shot. That's one that could get re-formatted into a painting via projection, printing, or tracing the outlines. Saved for later reference.
But no. I can't think of why they would be there or what they might be doing. Other than a 420 out in the woods by the pond, and I gotta drive. So ...
Some of the paintings don't get the space bling and I'm proud of that, love how the reflected light dances and shimmers. I'm aware that the format of a box for a painting surface is unconventional, but they served as a metaphor for the cloistered pandemic quarantine under which the method was arrived at.
Someone suggested I apply for a mural project (didn't meet the quals & that's showbiz) and all I could think was "Well, they'd have to get me an enormous box the size of a railway car and some mannequins dressed up in space suits." I've heard of crazier things ...
Stick with me here, you'll like this. (Both blog and video now re-edited for brevity) I want to sieze the moment and bring readers up to speed on current methods. All paints & gels by Golden Artist Colors.
The materials used on this project, begun October 2021 (!!). Now painting on smaller plain wood boxes with an ambition to craft 3d artworks that suggest found object dioramas. I want the painting itself to suggest a hybrid between painting and ceramics, and be more about crafting the materials than painting pictures.
Above are the range of acrylics used for this particular box, which itself was a plain craft shop type box found on Amazon for about $6. Below is a short video which outlines how the use of Clear Tar Gel in particular had a significant hand in how I was able to "finish" the painting off.
Long short is that the artwork got way overworked especially the sky. Poor thing even began to de-laminate in places where the luan layers moistened up.
The space terrain is boss and that patch of dawn peeking through at left was OK. But everything else above those hills was weak and I darn near almost tried sanding it off.
Fasteners go on the back, and my presumption has always been that the work will be shown on a wall at some point so I always let the painting spill over onto the bottom. Which itself is piled over with layers of either the Clear Tar Gel or the Matte Heavy Gel I like to use to help adhere the Crackle Paste to the surface.
I tried putting various toy pieces in to see if they could bring the painting to life, this here my custom painted Marx Toys "Moon Base" series space tank from 1962 missing its bulldozer blade. I always use toy pieces that are damaged, playworn, or inexpensive copies. It re-purposes what would be someone's garbage. But this didn't help: The tank was more successful than the box, which breaks the only rule -- The painting has to be as sweet as whatever goes inside or it's flea market fare.
Cactus piece from a cowboy playset out of Spain, early 1970s? Bonus goodie from a vendor that caught my attention and became thematically attached to this box painting. What else to go with it to tell a little story?
Space Hippies with Kool Kombi Camper, and an early look for the sky. Volkswagen from 2018 by Hot Wheels, figures by Multiple Toymakers c.1969. Accurately describing the interior contents is part of the materials list for me. Collectors of Hot Wheels etc may happen upon an online listing while searching their favorite collectibles. And boom.
This setup did not make the cut but we got pix and those can be printed, and I save archives of all my photo sessions for just that purpose. Good art leads to more art. See anything you like feel welcome to email or leave a comment below.
"Space Tourists Posing for Pix by the Giant Space Cactus out near Ganymede Station" didn't make the cut. Figures by Airfix and Multiple Toymakers, "4xForce" 2019 by Matchbox.
Ganymede Station is a creation of mine as a setting for many of the little narrative space scenarios. Inspired by "Ganymede Beacon" from the 1974 "Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen" adventure. My imagination suggesting that someday humankind will routinely travel our solar system on both research and commercial ventures and Jupiter will likely prove to be a good earner for both. Has like eighty moons some of which have atmospheres, the largest of which is Ganymede. Such a great name.
This almost made the cut - "The Last Pistolero from a Space Spaghetti Western". Larger scale figure made in Hong Kong copied from a classic MPC spaceman pose. Decided he needed a cowboy hat over that helmet or some eight year old was going to call me out on how that doesn't look like a cowboy. He'd be right, so natch that. Will be looking out for a vintage hat that might fit & thinking how to make my own.
I do like this angle, Space Pistolero headed for his showdown with his lunch box. Pix like these can be printed or projected or traced onto paper or canvas etc to be painted over/into and serve as flat artworks, even just as framed prints as is. Can be scaled up as large as the projector, and instantly overcomes my awkward rendering skills in depicting the human form or machines etc, when more precision would produce convincing results.
Trying to go minimal avant gardy here with medicine cups slathered with Micaceos Iron Oxide. Didn't make the cut, but did make me think how much I love glossing over these mica painted medicine cups with Clear Tar Gel, and the optical effect which resulted.
Applying a more or less even layer of Clear Tar Gel to the upside down "sky" inside the box here. Try to even it out and set it aside for 48 hours. The result is a glass clear film over whatever is underneath what appears to be a visible layer of glass. And while it does more or less level itself out while settling to dry, the end result is almost always slightly curved or warped from the naturally curved meniscus layer which forms, acting like a curved lens.
One minute video on the transformation results.
Proud of that now. The colors literally change as the angle of the eye moves relative to the surface. The speckles from the bits of mica also dazzle the eye and seem to shimmer like lights in the night sky.
I like to think of the boxes as nine small paintings all intersecting at right angles to each other. Each discreet panel should both read as it's all tiny painting and contribute to a larger composition involving all nine sides assembled as a box.
So I'm always peering at it from different angles to try and visualize how others will experience its qualities as a 3 dimensional object occupying space. Does that make it a sculpture too? I'll have to check into that.
YES.
I could see that sofa size.
I to use a helicopter crew for the narrative came up the week before when choosing this nice yellow helicopter for a different piece in 4x4x3 inch size. Helicopter a 1970s copy made in China, and the figure on the right is from the Golden Astronaut toy line, 1968.
"Pilot Down Behind The Lines", 4x4x3 inches overall. Finishing touch was the MPC B-52 bomber flying support just like in The Six Million Dollar Man. Pilot rescue scenes are a recurring motif and excuse for always keeping an eye out for more little helicopter toys. The more obsolete looking the better.
"Lunar Module Pilot Down Behind The Lines" is our title this time. Which is absurd, no Lunar Modules ever flew in combat. They were space pickups that landed on the moon so that guys could go off and play golf.
For now the figures & bling get adhered to the surface using a student grade craft hot glue gun for a flexible bond which would be easy enough to work loose without damaging the plastic figures.
See how projecting or tracing etc this image would result in a pretty smooth design for any project requiring guys doing exciting stuff with a helicopter. When painting them in they can be any color or wear any outfit or carry any gear one could think to paint into or over them. About to get busy with some of that part the concept this spring & summer with a refurbed studio basement. Room for a projector and five foot canvas, bring these into the human scale.
There he's making a break for it! I try to avoid choosing figures holding guns, but in this case it works on a thematic level. But yeah, we don't need to see more guns. They bring cameras up to the moon.
While having all this fun I try to keep in mind how viewers would be encountering the results in person i.e. gallery setting, which is nailed to some wall at or around average eye level. Viewers likely won't be crouching down to squint-eye the dutch angles I use for the macro pix. So the objectness of the overall box is just as important as what's inside.
That could also be a good action angle to try painting, with the lunar module pilot like in a blur as he runs for his life. We try to keep the scenes humorous and sly but this is one for those who love action.
Proud of that. Will share up how it finalizes, and my aim for the blog is to have a at least new smallish post every 2nd day. Stop back again soon!
