alien menagerie #7 • spring

This is a painting that I've had around for quite a while in a mostly completed state. I added the final bits to this last month and I'm finally comfortable with calling it finished.

oil on wood panel 18" x 20"

Alien menagerie #7 is "SPRING" from a series devoted to the four seasons. 

I haven't done these in any particular order, but three are now finished.

It's the first day of autumn here in the Northern hemisphere, but south of the equator the September equinox brings spring!

alien menagerie #12 • the atomic alien

The atomic alien #1 tunes in from the new frontier, a retro-future where bubble helmets are all the rage and time stands still. I bet they listen to Dave Brubeck out there. This one is a small, 6" x 8" painting. I'm pretty sure there will be more...

oil on wood panel 12" x 12"

alien menagerie #9 • the red alien

I've recently completed a few paintings, two of which have been on and off my easel at various times. First up to share is The Red Alien. I concepted this a couple years back as part of a Red/Yellow/Blue series of paintings. Pretty much everything I plan for alien menagerie is, or could be part of a small series of works.  The thing is, I get more ideas for pieces than I have time to paint so for now the Red Alien hangs alone.

oil on wood panel 12" x 12"

Color theory in the foundation studies at the art school I attended, the Columbus College of Art & Design is built around the Munsell system so it was about this time of year in 1980 that I first encountered it. The first project is learning how colors can be understood as a combination of hue, value and chroma and starts out as loose color chips:

to be assembled into a set of 10 color charts

After that, it's a year long series of small gouache paintings looking at different aspects of color and their combinations. Mixing and organizing colors by these principles has been a natural part of my work ever since then. I couldn't imagine doing a series of aliens organized by color without building in an homage to Albert Munsell.

I'll be showing this, along with several other new Alien Menagerie pieces at Illuxcon later this week in the Allentown Art Museum.

the enigma aliens at Gallery Nucleus

Last night "The Animal Kingdom" opened at Gallery Nucleus and alien menagerie 10 & 11 were part of this show.These are small pieces, measuring 6" X 8". Working this size, I chose to focus mostly on the aliens, and keep the environment stark, aiming for a surreal tone overall. The enigma aliens inhabit dream-space, their character a mystery.

Here's a video showing progress on enigma alien 2.

I wasn't ready to leave their world behind, so I made this extract depicting an alien which was a contender for enigma 2.

I'd like too thanks Wade Buchanan for inviting me to participate. "The Animal Kingdom" is viewable online here.

alien evolution

In 1974 (or there about) I did this drawing of a guy who I named "Neptonian". A lot of the inspiration for this character came from the Outer Space Men toy, Astro-Nautilus (with a bit of Star Trek the Animated series thrown in). I still remember drawing this and how much fun it was to do.

Seventeen years later I was still painting aliens. This one was done as a book cover for the James White novel the "Genocidal Healer" in 1991.

Astronomer • alien menagerie #4, was done eighteen years after "Genocidal Healer" (thirty-five years since the "Neptonian"). I'm still painting aliens.

*it's still a really enjoyable thing to be doing 

snowman from outer space

Is September an odd time to be considering snowmen? This is "winter" in alien menagerie. Somewhere in the galaxy it's snowing right now.

oil on wood panel 19" x 20"

Deconstructing the "Astronomer"

For this post I'm going to look back at a previous painting, Alien Menagerie 004 • 天文学者 (Astronomer).

I wanted the astronomer to feature a cratered, lunar surface and an airless sky. Astronomer would be floating near weightless in the middle of the box. I went through various sketches I'd made over time, and found this one. It had a character I liked, and was the basis for the Astronomer.

These sketches outline most of the idea.

None of them have everything in place, but each of them contributed something to the composition of the final piece.

In preparation, I collected together reference photos. For inspiration, I pulled images of antique astronomical devices from the internet, principally telescopes, and armillary spheres.

I photographed the observatory at the New York Hall of Science Museum in queens NY. It's on one of the few remaining structures from the 1964 world's fair in Flushing Meadows Park. There's a lot of similarity from one observatory dome to another, but I liked using this particular one, modest as it is.

I also went to the internet for for photos of 1960's era control panels. Apollo mission control panels were what I was most interested in, but I found features I liked in photos of F-4 control panels as well. Then it was off to the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City New York.They have the original Lunar Module, which was intended for the Apollo 18 mission to Copernicus Crater in 1973. More to the point, they have plenty of control panels with the sort of knobs and switches I was interested in photographing as reference.

The next step was a color study, and refinement of the idea in photoshop. It's an incredible advantage of digital medial that you can paint and revise an image rapidly. Mapping the star chart to the inner walls of the box for reference is a huge advantage as well I must say! All this would get painted later, but I really want to solve most of the drafting, composition, and color decisions in advance.

The previous three alien menagerie paintings all featured cyclopean individuals. I was concerned about painting yet another single eyed alien enough to have a look at a version with a few more eyes. Conceptually it worked fine for me and could be justifiable, but I wasn't sure about this one. I printed out 2 versions and hung them on the wall for a while. I surveyed the family. In the end, the singularity of just one eye to look through the telescope was more powerful. It seemed it was the correct decision for this piece after all.

Above is the final digital study. From this I would make a final pencil drawing on drafting vellum. I transfer it to a gessoed birch plywood panel with graphite paper.

While I like going into a painting pretty well prepared, with most of the important decisions made in advance, it doesn't preclude making changes.

I submitted the painting in progress, to some friends looking for critical feedback. It was pointed out that the head appeared to be balanced on the neck, as if it could easily roll off. Realistic, credible, alien anatomy, is not what I'm pursuing in these paintings, but as a matter of design, I knew the neck had to be fixed.

At one point I textured the control panel and facade of the box. While I liked that it gave the surface some detailing, I decided it was better to stay true to a flat gray painted metal that was characteristic of the Apollo control panels.

Time willing, I could do a several "Astronomers". I'd make a series of them, much in the spirit of Joseph Cornell's "Observatories". His work in general is one of the many influences that affect and inspire me.

Probably each would have to incorporate a star chart, maybe an observatory, and an antenna tower. Star charts and observatories have their place for pretty obvious narrative reasons. Antenna towers I find visually appealing, but it also implies a communication network. Would all the various astronomers be in communication with each other? Perhaps, but while I seek to construct a narrative (of sorts), I also prefer that it not be entirely explicit.

footnote:

the original moleskin sketch was the source for this painting ~ alien menagerie extract 6

Finished with Summer

When is a painting finished?

Sometimes a piece is finished by the necessity of a deadline, which can actually be a very useful. Lacking that, the question becomes more open ended. I've worked on this piece at various times, off and on. I considered it close to finished and sat it aside for months. I worked on other things and eventually came back and gave it more attention. I finally feel comfortable with calling it finished.

For a long time alien menagerie was a stack of pencil sketches and notes. I worked on and accumulated them for years without moving forward with them as paintings. Commercial work always took precedence, but slowly I've been finding ways to make more time for these pieces. I designed this guy a few years ago, while participating in an online design forum. It was a way to push my sketches and ideas for alien menagerie into a more fully realized form by making a digital painting weekly. The moderator of the forum had a thing about plants not being eligible as a source for creature design, so I took that as something to challenge in and of itself! I was quite fond of the result and knew I'd come back to eventually.

When I'm organizing ideas, I tend to think in terms of a thematic series. Lots of lists live among my sketches. This creature fit nicely into a series of four pieces on the theme of seasons. 春夏秋冬。This is summer.

Spring would be the logical place to start, but I didn't.

Winter is in progress.

This won't be a daily blog. Writing for me is a long process of write, erase, and write again, so I'm not a terribly efficient or confident wordsmith. That being said, I hope this becomes a useful avenue where I can express some of the thinking behind the pictures I make, and perhaps give a little insight into just what the heck I'm doing.

Finishing summer seems like a good place to start. September is a good time for starting something new.