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.
