1981, acrylic on illustration board, 20 x 30 inches, (top part is cut off)
Another 30 Year post for your retro pleasure. This is my 5th painting. ( you can see the first four in my May 2011 post ) As my first four paintings were done while finishing high school, this painting was done in a summer limbo period before an unknown future of not going back to school and not having a job. One can see some obvious influences such as a Frazetta, Whelan or Boris setting and the use of a Kull or Krull figure from a comic magazine Bizarre Adventures #26. I thought at the time I had quite an original idea with the juxtaposition of the two different worlds, a theme that would be prevalent in many future work. Wait a sec, It already has been prevelant in my previous three paintings. Funny. I remember feeling really at home painting the buildings without any reference, but I was stumped by how to paint the vegetation. To this day I still really like this one, though I cringe a little bit for the swipes of reference. Hey, I was only 17. I am amazed that I kept track of how long it took me to paint the different parts of the painting and how long I spent on preliminary drawings etc. In total, 63 hours.
