Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Art: Russian Space paintings (2006)

5" x 5" each, acrylic on framed board.

I created these paintings for a group show at the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co., which is the storefront of the McSweeney's-driven non-profit writing center, 826 Seattle.

Given the name of the store, the show was space-themed. I initially was going to do a series of paintings about the various Russian space dogs, but it was difficult to find good imagery of the dogs, except for Laika. So I expanded out the concept to icon events of the early Russian space program: Laika, Sputnik, Vostok, and Yuri Gagarin.

I designed each of the assemblages in illustrator, and then made seperations for each color as black positives. These would then be projected onto the painting surface with an old overhead projector. Since my painting surface was only 5 x 5", and I was going to need to scale down the seperations so that they each were only about one inch square.

Each color layer was projected, traced, and painted seperately. The entire process took about 4 evenings to complete. The hardest part was painting detail at that small of a scale. In any case, they turned out differently than I thought, but still look pretty decent, I think.