The Long Road Back

Well it's been a bumpy winter with lots of time away from the drawing table.... which was NOT how I planned to spend it.  Apparently some crappy ergonomics and job transition stress caused a bit of a malfunction in a collection of muscles in my shoulder and neck, which resulted in months of widespread pain and headaches that pretty much shut me down for a while.  I have yet to actually pull up to the table again, but I have been able to do a little bit of digital coloring, and spent some time putting a few pinboards together on Pinterest.  One of them applies directly to the spirit of this blog.... "Space Age", a collection of retro-futurism from the 50's and 60's.  It depicts a world that never really arrived, but was inspired by the space race of the time.

It's interesting how our view of the world and our future changed after we finally got to the moon.  We landed, collected some moon rocks, and for all intents and purposes, went home.  Well then we had the shuttle program which was great fun, but for whatever reason, our national mindset today is not geared towards space, the future, or any kind of off-world dreams.  I laughed the other day when I saw a bumper sticker of the American flag, with the caption, "The Only Flag On The Moon".  Oy.  Because  'Murica??  The truth is, IF those flags still exist, they would be sun bleached beyond any recognition.  Meanwhile, Cosmos has returned to the airwaves, only to become the target of freakshow "intelligent" designers who toss science out in favor of religious myths.... I hate to break it to people, but we didn't make it to the moon rejecting science.  It took thousands of smart people like aerospace engineers, astronomers, mathematicians, and so many more to get us to the moon.  It will take continued investment in science and engineering, and our BRAINS to get us back to the moon and beyond.  Then maybe we can get back on track to obtaining our long-overdue flying cars.

Please visit http://www.pinterest.com/dbielski/space-age/ and enjoy this collection of futuristic images that I find inspiring.

Vintage Science Books

While the world is busy falling in love with Superman again (and really, what's not to love about the new Superman??), I am reminded of some of the original books that made me want to fly to the stars myself when I was a kid.  I recently came across some old hardbound and paperback "How & Why Wonder Books" that I used to read all the time when I was in my single digits.  These books made kids like me want to study the sciences. I wonder if kids these days really get to explore the world with something other than a computer game, but I digress.  I love the futuristic take on the illustrations... especially where a lot of these were created well before we actually landed on the moon, or before we ever sent Viking, Pioneer, and Voyager out to get close up pictures of the planets.  I could say it a hundred times, I was definitely a child of the space age, and I suppose I always will be :-)

I have also been collecting vintage Golden Guides recently, which are probably the better known books for their illustrations.  I'll post more about those at a later date.

The Gemini II Recovery, Recovered

Recently, I've found myself saying frequently that I'm very much a child of the space age, and here is one of the reasons why.  When we were kids, my dad would break out his slide collection every once in a while and give us a show.  More often than not, we would be treated to photos my dad took when he was in the navy in the 1960's.  I fondly recall seeing images of the Gemini II landing, which his aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Lake Champlain, recovered.  I mean, I was the crazy kid to get up early in the 1980's to see space shuttle launches, so I guess I figured every kid had a dad who got to be there when space capsules splashed down, right?  I know now that these are really special memories, and I was a lucky kid to have been this close to the space race. For me, it was just a part of life to dream about going to space... I know I did.  I was the kid that was going to land on Mars, apparently.

When my dad retired and moved to North Carolina recently, he asked me to hang on to his photos and slides until he could transport them himself.  Well, I did what any normal kid would do some 30 years later... I went rumaging thru the archives until I could find those Gemini II images... and I did.  My dad recently turned 70, and I scanned a few of the slides to be incorporated in a photo display that my younger sister put together.  Below are the best of these images.  I will have them professionally scanned someday, bur for now, 1600 dpi scanning from my own scanner will have to do.  They have a bit of an Instagrammy, ghostly quality... but if nothing else, they are historic and simply must be shared.  These haven't really been seen by anyone in decades.  So here for you are some recovered images of the recovery of Gemini II, as seen thru the lens and the eyes of a navy meterologist, who happens to have the same name as me :-)

 

P.S. I've been told that somewhere in the collection are a few snapshots of the astronauts themselves.  Looks like I have more digging to do...  When I find them, I will post them on this blog.

Revision:  I was advised by said retired meteorologist, that these were in fact Gemini II, an unmanned mission.  U.S.S. Lake Champlain also picked up Gemini V which carried Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad.  I've revised this blog post to correct the mission, which I had previously described as Gemini V.  These images are in fact from Gemini II.  More to come, once I do some more digging. (6/6/2015)

Space Age Art of Robert McCall

This weekend, Sir Robert and I paid a visit to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC.  It had been about 20 years since I had been there, so it was good to get back there and see some great things again.  Space capsules, a Lunar Module, giant rockets, a section of Skylab, Pioneer, Viking, they were all there.  One of the most impressive things to see, however, was not a piece of machinery.... it was a mural.  On the wall in the main lobby was an amazing depiction of space exploration.  A moon landing and an larger-than-life Apollo astronaut seemed to gaze out at the museum visitors, amid a backdrop of countless planets, starts, and galaxies.   The style of the work was very familiar to me, so today,  I did some Googling to find out who the man was behind the work.

The mural, aptly named, "The Space Mural - A Cosmic View", was painted in 1976 by Robert McCall.  McCall is probably one of America's greatest space age painters of all time.  As I paged thru images of his work, I realized I had seen lots of his paintings before.  I was taken back to my youth, when I had a great sense of optimism for space exploration, science, and the future.  It's clear to me that McCall wished to share this same sense of optimism and vision with all those who saw his work.  He really spoke to an entire generation that grew up watching moon landings, shuttle launches, and planetary fly-bys.  At least, I can say, he spoke to me.  As I looked at the mural, and the array of capsules and rocketry, I said aloud in the museum that I always dreamt of space travel and the future... and I still do.

These are photos I took of the mural:

Here's a great article about McCall.  Here is another.

And just because... here are images of a few of the space stamps that Robert McCall's work appears on: