Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Space Industry 1977




I am now entering into another phase of my slide and art archiving program. This will involve the digitization of all my slides of my space art. I have been doing space art of one kind or another since the late 1970s. I have hundreds of space art pieces in my archives, so this will take a long time.

In those days, I was very much a member of the Boston science fiction fan community. I partied with them, sold art to them, went to conventions with them, and listened to all sorts of wonderful ideas about how humanity would go into space and create space colonies orbiting the Earth. The future seemed bright and exciting, especially for young male libertarians, who couldn't wait to blast off to freedom. Space would become a capitalist utopia where the best, the brightest, and the bravest would mine asteroids and gas giant planets for mineral resources. Energy would be limitless, with no worries about pollution, because you were in space, not in someone's atmosphere.

It was this notion that inspired this picture of a space-based refinery, which I did in the summer of 1977, in ink and watercolor, 10" x 8". The typeface for the caption was stenciled in, the only time I have ever done that. A fan friend bought the picture. I wonder where she is today. My Boston fan friends are mostly still around, and there is still a science fiction community in Boston. They are old and often infirm, and their heroic dreams of off-planet ventures have faded like my old slides from that era.

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