The specific source of inspiration: The gorgeous terrain forms on the Marx "Lunar Exploration" diorama playset.
My chosen material: Fallen concrete scraps from the ceiling of the late 40s bomb shelter attached to our house in Syracuse
My chosen slabs, first sealed on their flat sides with Clear Tar Gel.
First gently washed then doused with Golden Artist Colors' Clear Tar Gel, my favorite of their acrylic mediums. The larger slab instantly appealed to me for the rust staining from a support girder.
Clear Tar Gel is very viscous, almost fluid, and hardens without leaving brush strokes as a super glossy smooth surface. Like melted glass, and I like using it to simulate a ceramic glaze effect.
Drying on a garbage can lid with an unfinished 3d wood painting from 2018.
Studying coral and rock forms used to make a retaining wall in the back yard.
Coral.
Granite.
Now observing the Marx nacu-sculpted forms. Each is plastic, more or less hollow and I am pretty sure then hand tinted or stained after being formed.
My results, dime added for scale.
And in application. Figures & rocket made in Hong Kong, likely mid to late 70s.
Hot Wheels' Aero Pod "Glow Wheel" Variant, 2016 - The Official Vehicle of Space Trucks.
"Space Trucks" is the name for an art project I conceived over the grim CNY winter of 2018 - 2019. Sparked by an interest in the color & flash of a Hot Wheels car on a bleak winter afternoon trip to the grocery store. The color and form stood out amongst the half melted slush, barf-brown mud puddles and invasive cold. I responded to them as art forms, little painted cast metal/plastic sculptures on wheels. Over a period of a couple months the focus narrowed onto die cast vehicles with a space application or futuristic look. Usually work-related vehicles -- trucks -- and hence the name "Space Trucks" which came to me one morning when trying to think of a way to describe the kind of vehicles which interested me.
By February of 2019 the focus shifted from diecast vehicles specifically to space vehicles, and in particular vintage space vehicles I already had a passion for. The Apollo Program spacecraft, in particular Grumman's marvelous Lunar Module and the Boeing designed Lunar Roving Vehicle. Obtaining examples of them to fit in with the scale of the Hot Wheels & Matchbox cars I'd collected over the winter became the order of the day. Then the rockets and space capsules which got them there, and astronauts to pilot them. A pivotal experience was a late February shopping excursion to find astronaut forms in the retail stores I would expect to find them: Walmart, Target, Walgreens.
None. Nothing. The frustration of not being able to find a single fucking astronaut guy let to a revelation that if you want space toys of meaning you *have* to go vintage. There's been no looking back since, and indeed vintage = money so the die cast thing ended about the same time. Mattel represents the factions which have skewed away from Space Toys, with NASA itself likely being the biggest culprit by having turned their Space Shuttle program into a disaster. Nobody wants much to do with space these days, as far as retail toy production goes, with only Lego )or Dollar Store lines emulating Lego) producing anything of merit related to the subject.
I found my astronauts in time, and rockets. As well as a collecting idiom or three to pursue: Plastic Spacemen, plastic Space Toys made in Hong Kong 1960 - 1980, and the incredible space themed playsets by Marx Toys 1950 - 1980. Some of which I had as a kid, though sadly the only scrap of my childhood Space Toy collection is a single astronaut from a Revell "Tranquility Base" kit I built when I was eleven. The rest is gone: Major Matt Mason and his Oxygen Tent, a Space Bucket play kit with moon rover and a couple dozen two inch astronauts. G.I. Joe in his foil spacesuit, don't think I had the Mercury program type space capsule made for him but I did bond deeply with the six-wheeled ATV from the incredible "Secret of the Mummy's Tomb" set (still have the mummy! fist pump), which lives this day in a stash of six wheeled ATV type craft. And a thumb-powered helicopter to patrol the front yard with, whose spirit lives on in an admiration for archaic helicopter & airplane forms.
So, Toys, as an extension of an artistic agenda. I'd been looking for a "New Way" of packaging my art, having come to the conclusion that the current generation(s) coming of age who have the discretionary income to spend are not trained to buy art. They buy toys, books, movies, things for their office desks. Gadgets & gizmos. There's also an appetite for Atom Age nostalgia, and Space Race nostalgia, with the Space Race having effectively ended in 1975 with Apollo/Soyuz. Start from there and work backwards: Cosmonauts being fired into orbit in a tin can with little more than a crash helmet & oxygen tank to see them through. Astronauts landing on the moon with golf clubs, firing off tee shots into the unknown. And the plethora of imaginative, functional, and useful technologies which came out of it, from the flawless performance of the LM to Tang or other instant beverages, pre-packaged food, travel razors and pens which work even upside down.
Celebrating those ideas is what this project is about and the toys the departure point. They are party of a visual vocabulary, just as important as paint or the surfaces onto which one applies it. They also instantly gave a near cosmic scope to my work, which had been hemmed in by minimal technique and demising time to learn. The early works have been photography based but my hope is to begin incorporating the toys themselves into the works and then begin fabricating my own. Will show examples here as the project develops. It's not just about another show at the gallery I administrate, it's about a whole new way of working, and packing myself as an artist.
"The Astronaut's Dream"
I'm the Space Trucks guy now. Here's what I'm doing. It's multimedia based, lots of video and Instagram, there's new stuff every day and the project as much about the culture of collecting as the toys themselves. There's a learning curve, I may have annoyed a few by being enthusiastic but that's just me. I'm an artist and when I get excited about a subject look out.
