Late summer, Cambridge

Back to 1984. While I was producing space and fantasy images in my studio in Cambridge, Mass., I was also roaming my neighborhood drawing pictures of houses and street scenes in a sketchbook. I drew the sketch in brown ink, used watercolor pencil to note the colors and then added watercolor in the studio to finish the work. I did quite a number of these, on location sitting on a folding stool, before winter came and made it impossible to draw outdoors. This one is dated August 21, 1984. Ink and watercolor on sketchbook page, 5" x 9".

Space Flower

I love gardening and plants almost as much as I love art. So I tried to combine the two with space flowers. This is a rendering of a spaceship in the form of a Columbine flower. The rear of the spaceship is towards the upper left, and is emitting a propulsion trail of green gas. This picture was done in 1985, and is acrylic on Strathmore illustration board, 12" x 21". The top is somewhat empty because I hoped that it might be bought for a science fiction book cover, and the title and writing would go there. No book cover happened, though the picture was bought by a fan in 1986.

Looking back from now at my old science fiction pictures, I think of how I could have made their compositions more exciting. This picture could have been so much better if I had done a close-up view turned more towards the viewer, with less space around it, and the attendant ships more visible and active. I'm not about to go back to this concept any time soon, though.

The Man Without Pain or Fear or Guilt

You gotta have character portraits if you're doing illustrations. Rand is no exception, but she gives you a really difficult job. Who is John Galt? What does he look like? I haven't done faces in a while, and I've been poring through years and years of files, as well as Google Images, for pix of ruggedly handsome manly movie guys. Rumor was that Rand herself thought Robert Redford could play him. But Redford seems too cowboy-ish for a Midwestern working-class engineer hero. More recently, movie idol Brad Pitt has expressed an interest in the part, and I think with enough makeup and tweaking, he might be able to do it, but he isn't gonna get the chance. I think eventually only computer-generated animation will solve the problem of bringing ATLAS SHRUGGED to the big screen.

Given that, here's my sketchy rendition of J. Galt. Author Rand gives him a page-long introduction, as he gazes into the eyes of Dagny, the female lead, for the first time. "A face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt....arrogance, tension, and scorn," but also "serene determination of certainty, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness nor grant it." Wow, that's a hard act to work.

My sketch is inadequate to capture this, but it's only a first draft anyway. What would a person with the aforementioned qualities really look like? My drawing is a bit too pretty. And I haven't conveyed just how bad-ass John Galt is. After all, this is a guy who came up with a scheme to take all the competent and intelligent people out of key positions so that civilization would collapse! And not only that, he was able to persuade them to follow him. He's really somewhat like one of those social visionaries like John Brown the abolitionist, essentially a fanatic in a good cause. A cause which will result in many deaths, as Rand details in many scenes of her book. And I have to also mention that Galt is capable of rape, although with a "willing" partner. All this will go into a good illustration, probably in the black and white graphics I am doing.

John Galt is digitally rendered in industrial-strength Photoshop, over a quick ink drawing.

Heavy Industry

I learned to love heavy industry when I was young, from my father who was impressed with it in a sort of Socialist Realist way. I was privileged to see the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio in 1973, before they disappeared. And I am probably one of the few people who rejoice when driving through the refinery area of Elizabeth, New Jersey on the Jersey Turnpike. I love the towers, the complexity of metal beams and tubes and platforms, the primal shapes and geometry, and of course the volcanic power of flames and furnaces and gas jets lighting up the night sky.

Madame Rand feels the same way. In ATLAS SHRUGGED she spends rapturous pages talking about the thrill of heavy industry, whether it be refineries or steel mills or railroads or mines. She has absolutely no sympathy for environmentalism; she loved smokestacks. This is, as she would put it, "the shape of Man's achievement on earth." And she meant man, not "people's." These grand, phallic structures are the work of males, through and through, from design to forging to building to operation. You don't hear that said very much. It's politically incorrect. And yet the macho power of heavy industry resonates throughout Rand's book. Rand visited steel mills doing her research for the book, but she portrayed them not so much as engineering but as a kind of artistic symbol for the brilliant industrial achievements she exalted. It's not socialist realism...it's capitalist fantasy.

I did this picture in that busy year of 1984, 25 years ago. It shows new rockets being moved through a giant assembly structure. This structure, of course, is not really a rocket assembly. It's gantries and transporters from a steel mill. I have a large library of books about heavy industry, filled with exciting pictures of these complex structures. The design is deliberately retro, even for the 80s. If you look closely (click on the picture for a somewhat larger version) you can see tiny figures moving about in the metal network, going about their business. Painting is acrylic on illustration board, 14" x 18".

25 years later, there is hardly any of this earth-shaking heavy industry left in the USA. It's all in China or India or some other ambitious place that doesn't mind danger and pollution. I'm not sure just what kind of capitalist fantasy we could have in 2009. Web 2.0? Video games? Sustainable energy from biomass? Software? Where are the girders, the great wheels, the mighty engines? Where are the hardhats? Where are the flames in the night? Atlas is poking away at computer code, lit by a pale, flickering screen in the darkness.

The Literary Robot

Even artificial android intelligences want to read books. This one is perusing ATLAS SHRUGGED and wondering why Ayn Rand did not include robots in her story. Or perhaps she did. Illustration for an album cover still in progress, ink on bristol board, 7" x 5 1/2".

Dark Planet

By 1984 I had switched to acrylic and also had a finer-spraying airbrush which allowed me to do nice space scenes and special effects. From the number of artworks which I am cataloguing from that year, it seems I was quite busy in 1984. Part of this was that I was preparing a show for the 1984 World Science Fiction Convention in the Los Angeles area so I was making art that would be suitable for a large audience.

This piece is originally titled "Dark Contemplation," a title taken from the literature of Christian mysticism. I was quite fascinated by that in those years, and I read some of the great texts such as Saint John of the Cross, the Byzantine Saint Symeon, and the anonymous "Cloud of Unknowing." But as I can admit now, I was more interested in the phenomena of altered consciousness and mystical visions presented in these authors, than actually following that mystical path myself. I was no good at meditation or humility, and I had no impulse to help my fellow human beings in charitable work. Yet those texts were really inspiring to me when it came to images, and I guess they still are.

"Dark Contemplation" is dated April 1984. It is acrylic on illustration board and is 8" x 8". It was sold at LA-Con 1984 for a very modest sum.

Feeling Purple Tonight

Reach for the stars, purple rays! Be ultraviolet tonight...The stars are shining mercilessly, but you are stronger than they are. Your reason and will can overcome gravity! Energy radiates from excited electrons. There is a direction to your radiance, as long as you know you can control it. Aim for the stars, purple ray, be ultraviolet in the long night. And happy birthday, Tanheu.

Photoshop, one of the "K-series" abstractions.