This was good. I try to update a trailer for my main YouTube channel and had forgotten about this one. Digital movie project from November 2020. Runs 1 minute 45 seconds. Will dig out pix on the project and do a nice looksee. Have used the diorama box for other projects but keep the toy pieces shown stashed inside, good to go when the display opportunity is right.
Intro thumbnail for the blog, its link should open the video as well or use the playback options below. The first few moments are very soft by the way. Uses a public domain LP recording of the Stravinsky theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kinds of builds up from peaceful calm, you know? and the entire video project is an homage to both 2001 and ALIEN, with people finding something unexpected someplace they were drawn to by signals detected in space.
Materials used were a "Lost in Space" diecast Lunar Module vehicle by Johnny Lightning, LP Toys & Giant Plastics figure copies made in Hong Kong by unknowns. Acrylics by Golden Artist Colors, crater sculpted using "Great Stuff" foam insulation, modeling clay for the Space Sentinel. Housing box randomly saved from the recycle heap; 10x20x8 inches overall.
Music source unknown vinyl rip from LP. Short subject made using iMovie at my home basement media arts lab. Feel welcome to peruse my channel's other videos & public playlists for more, bookmark and subscribe. Content dating back to 2009! wow.
We're back, and with renewed purpose. First of many things is that I have finally updated and brought up to speed all current digital/online tools. It will be far easier for me to leave casual posts up when new things come up that I'd like to cover here.
Recent YouTube upload outlining a scheme to use a Bruder Toys "Astro Mini" lunar lander in one of my 4x4 inch space box paintings.
I have a second blog as well with which I cover my activities as a fine arts creator, correspondent and curator working independently in the always fascinating Central New York Arts Continuum. Which can mean pretty much anything and why I adopted the term to the regional exposure and involvement I've been pursuing more or less full-time since 2008. Most recently as the Artist in Residence and Curator for The Tech Garden, a startup incubator managed by Centerstate CEO shows for every period therein. Their events department closed in June 2020 during the pandemic and I had to help take care of my parents, but man what an opportunity, and responsibility.
Some of our shows had the artworks of up to 100 artists or more and we pursued what I call "Concept Shows", where artists would be invited to bring in works pertaining to a given theme usually related to pop culture. One was a theme show about David Bowie, another was liteally "Star Trek Vs. Star Wars". My favorite was the one I called Fun In Space about influences from pulp science fiction to rock and roll. The last show I produced for them was about Fish for January 2020, with the gallery stocked full of 136 fish artworks of all size or materials by artists ranging from 8 to 89. Might have been the best of them all, though I'm a science fiction geek and will always nod to Fun In Space.
This blog was given over to a newfound (2018) passion for collecting and making artworks with or about vintage plastic space toys c.1950 - 1980. It's posts are more about the culture of collecting such things including the minutea and drama that only such niche enthusiasts could get worked up over. So it seemed logical to pursue that kind of content on a separate outlet from the painting and gallery shows, and that's what this blog (or "this side" as I call it) is for. Geeks who like vintage space toys and how they might relate to pursuit of fine arts creation.
Another "Culture of Collection" upload focused on an unknown miniature diecast vehicle line produced in Japan early 1960s (?). Perfect size for the box paintings, would love to learn more about them.
I needed a name and thought about the kind of toy forms I was drawn to. Most are smallish, functional looking ground vehicles maybe with in-scale figures as an operating crew. Not military vehicles either but work vehicles or functional vehicles - Trucks, meant to be utilized for space borne activities. I also thought about my favorite science fiction influence, the film ALIEN from 1979, whose human cast is often referred to as "Truckers in Space", who operate Space Trucks.
Space Truckers. Though I don't usually do action figures. Plastic playset figures are more my bag.
Not flashy Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon hero types, in their swimsuit tights with capes, being all heroic and saving the day. Have a big parade & wave, right. My space heroes are the workaday slobs who man the machinery, maintain the rockets and end up being low man on the totem pole next time it's some guy's turn to go over the edge. They aren't heroes and don't want glory and often have some sort of quasi military role.
Pilot Downed Behind The Lines, a recurring motif I like to pursue. I still remember seeing "Bridges of Toko-Ri" some Sunday afternoon on television with my brothers and being blown away. Weren't those the good guys? and they still bought it.
And get into trouble. Most of my astronauts are accident prone, known for locking their keys in the spacecraft, forgetting to make sure the handbreak on the Lunar Module is set right, or get into trouble with implacable alien administrators who are tired of all the racket. Some of our spacemen come to foul ends but most just sort of stand there wondering what just happened? as the guy they were just talking to gets sucked out of the airlock or something.
We also have fun. It's a mixed gender universe or mixed "whatever" universe, all are welcome and there's plenty of girls to keep the rocket jocks in their places. Usually standing there befuddled while she ejects the contaminated plutonium nodule or whatever, he was getting around it it. Upcoming is also the big Astronauts Ball on Regulus and we'll need to hook all the ladies from the collection up with an appropriate date including some of the robots. My won't that be fun.
Will try to cross-post between the blogs as things take place. One notion I have been after with this side here is cultivating new audiences for my artwork, which since it involves science fiction and ideas related to vintage space toys should be right up your alley. Will make sure each side gets to see what the other may be up to and be sure to click here to visit & subscribe to my YouTube channel, which is the social platform that I'm actually most comfortable with. They police it, and I am delighted.
email ideas, job offers or any unattached adult sister's phone numbers to
space.trucks1138 @ gmail.com
or use the messaging system below to leave a comment. You don't have to sign in to chime in.
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.
