Far Far Away

The Giant

It seems I have always wanted to be an artist, but that is not entirely accurate. I want to take time here to write about how I got here.

As a kid I liked a lot of things, but a few things did push me along my path. One was the Apollo space program, another was the many old horror and science fiction movies I watched, a third was when I went with my dad when he was looking to buy a new car in 1972. Seeing all of the cars was exciting to me. After he bought his new car, a 1972 Impala, I continued to take an interest in all of the new cars that can out each year. My parents bought me the new car issues of Road & Track and Car & Driver. I don’t remember why, but one evening I sat on the floor and started to draw the cars I saw in the photos. My parents saw this and said I was really good, so they encouraged me to keep drawing.

They bought me watercolor paints, acrylic paints, canvas pads, sketch pads and Walter Foster art books. For a while I tried to follow the how-to examples in these books, but I soon lost interest. Art seemed to be only portraits, still life and landscapes, which I thought were dull. So I stopped for a couple of years.

I never did lose my love for SF and horror movies. In about 1977 I started to read a lot of SF books and the sudden boom in SF movies led me to think about writing for movies. I started to try writing some scripts and then tried to make some simple films with my dad’s super 8 camera. The SF movie I tried to make needed backdrops, so I pulled out my paints and painted the different planets on a backdrop to film with my spaceship model. From there I started some more movie ideas and sketched storyboards and painted posters.

I also was noticing the illustrations on the books I was reading and was inspired by Ralph McQuarrie’s paintings in The Art of Star Wars. So I started trying to copy some of my favorite SF paintings. I still had in mind being a writer and was writing a lot of stories, but as time went on I was doing more and more painting. When I got into high school I wanted to improve my drawing skills and was told to look at the Masters, in library books. I did and at this point I was entirely passionate about drawing and painting and becoming an artist.

Most of what I did back then was not good and has been destroyed. I did hang onto a couple of paintings out of nostalgia. The oldest I still have is Far Far Away (1980). This was an impossible but romantic view of outer space. It is very simple, but I still love all of those cresent moons and the dynamic composition they create with the spaceship. I recreated this digitally, at first wanting to stay very close to the original painting, but I quickly realized there were a lot of problems with that image. The final recreation keeps a lot of the composition, but lacks the mystery and dynamism of the original.

The second oldest work I still have is The Giant (1980). This is an illustration for a story I was writing about a gas giant planet that was a living organism. The painting and the story are not that good, but I still hang onto them for the inspiration they gave me to keep learning.