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.
Moon
Ganymede