A Close Encounter
Oil on Canvas
[48x24 inches]
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Astronaut paintings
Suburban Astronaut Studios
Not Participating in 2010 event
Web Site
www.astronautdinosaur.com
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I paint astronauts and, sometimes, dinosaurs.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, 8 years before I was born, so I have no firsthand knowledge of how it was received. I don’t know if people genuinely believed we'd be living in space, that we'd have robot butlers and flying cars, geodesic lunar homes, and genetically reconstituted dinosaurs helping or maybe eating us. But from Lost in Space to The Jetsons to Jurassic Park, popular culture has long treasured this space-age perception of the future. Generations raised on these programs, movies, and comics are now grown and living in a future filled with mini vans, Starbucks, iMacs, and Hip Hop videos. The world today is strange and unusual in ways unimagined in 1957, when Sputnik was launched, or in 1968, when 2001 was released. TThe present is in fact a very unusual place, and it's strangest in the ubiquity of things we take for granted.
The astronaut in my paintings is simply here to explore the present.
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