Michael C. Goodwin's Blog, page 20

Change

It has taken me a very long time to figure out what the heck is wrong with everyone on this planet. That is, until I took a close look at myself recently. We are all terrified of change. The one constant in our crazy, careening, out of control world, is change, rapid change. And we are all scared to death these days.

Consider our current political situation, fearful people elected a president who promised that he would take the country back to a time when things were great, where everyone knew their place. Too much change has been happening lately, why do we have to put up with this equality thing? Who needs immigrants? Why do we have to share? Why can’t we get rid of all those pesky government taxes and regulations, why does everyone need expensive health care or education, that would change everything, we just don’t need that, do we?

Why should we cooperate with other nations, aren’t we are better off on our own, they don’t have our values, they don’t look, or dress, or speak like us. Why should we change our way of life for them, what resources we use, what we want to do with the environment, they can change if they want to, why should we?

Why do we need to change what kind of fuels we use to power our civilization? Why do we need to change our gasoline cars, our home heating or anything else? Change is expensive, I can’t afford an electric car, or more expensive electric heating, everything works fine now, why bother to change it?

And for Gods sake, this climate thing is all blown out of proportion, nothing is changed, it still rains and snows, we still get droughts, it gets hot and cold, what’s the problem? If the wind blows over my house, the insurance will cover it. Because of floods and drought, food might get a little more expensive, whatever. So what if the oceans rise a little bit, just build a wall, and get someone else to pay for it. Nothing is changing, you are all stupid alarmists, you must have some secret agenda, why do you want to change things? What’s in it for you?

And when the water reaches my front door, I will continue to say so.

(Below is a fanciful illustration I did years ago, showing a past planetscape. The dinosaurs never worried about change, why should we?)

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Inherit the Wind

When I was in college, several of my good friends were theater majors, and were always some of the more interesting people that I knew. I always had a fondness for theater, primarily through set design and the artistry involved with creating the scenery which plays are acted against. But since there was a need for extras to play townsfolk in the show, they convinced me to accept a small part in the play other then my work on the backdrops. I have to say that it was one of the most interesting ways to see a play, that is, from the inside of the production on stage.

‘Inherit the Wind’ is based on a real event, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, where a teacher was imprisoned and then tried for teaching the theory of evolution in a Tennessee high school. On first view, the play is about an argument between religion and science. But on closer examination, it is a battle between free thought and religious dogma. In the course of the play, as the town people are being whipped into a religious and righteous fervor against the teacher, the local minister comes close to damming his own daughter, who loves the teacher, but is stopped with the Bible admonishment that, ‘He that troubleth his own house, shall inherit the wind.’

I am reminded of this play and my work in it from my long-ago past, by current events, as many people have been whipped into righteous fervor against a number of things; minorities, women, equal rights, education, science, environment, and climate change. We are disturbing our own house, and the consequences may be dire for our future. There is room for all views in this day and age. However, the need for free and clear thinking is necessary if we are to overcome the problems that we face, damming and ignoring them will only lead to our downfall.

(The photo below is from the 1955 movie, Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy and Fredic March as the two main antagonists during the trial. If you ever get a chance to see the movie version, do so, it is as relevant today as it was more than 60 years ago.)

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Old Photos

I have always enjoyed looking at old photos. There is nothing like looking at a frozen moment in time from days gone by. Photos of historic events are perhaps my greatest love. I always seem to get a thrill from the vague sense of being there and witnessing the moment as it happened. Perhaps that is why people enjoy taking photos of their lives so much. They can always go back to that moment, important or not and feel how they felt on that birthday, or wedding, or picnic, or date, or just sitting around with friends or family, enjoying the company of fellow human beings. We will always take photos wherever we go, even to the moon. That iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin standing on the lunar surface 50 years ago takes me back to that day every time. We will certainly take photos of the first humans on Mars, or any other distant place we may travel.

When my parents died, I inherited boxes of photos from their lives. It was an exhilarating and heartbreaking journey going through the pictures taken during their lives. I am fortunate, because I was part of their lives and they were always proud to take photos of me and my siblings. There are quite of few of them from our early days. My parents were not rich and I am sure that it cost quite a bit to buy film and pay for development and printing the photos, but that never stopped them, and I am very grateful. As I age, the memories of my younger days gets a bit fuzzy, and the photos certainly help to remember that time. The car we are standing in front of, the winter clothing we are dressed in, the shoes, the hats, the rolled up cuffs on my pants and the setting help bring back the memory of my childhood. The very best thing about photographs is that they can often chronicle the journey of our lives and that is also the journey of our species as well.

(This photo was taken in 1957, East St. Louis, I was six, my sister Linda, five and my little sister Debbie, three.)

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Muralist

One of the things that I never thought I would put on a resume as an artist, was muralist. The idea of painting a massively huge, wall-sized piece of art was always very daunting. I generally kept my illustrations to a rather sane size of 15 by 20 inches, horizontal or vertical. That was a way of using the very expensive larger pieces of illustration board (30 by 40 inches), and getting four pieces out of them to paint on, thus saving money, always a good idea for a perpetually poor artist like me. Plus, who could afford the cost of all that paint you would need to cover a large space, paint was also very expensive.

But then, I came across a very old photo of me standing in front of a rather large-sized painting from the very early seventies, unmistakably a mural. How could I forget something like that. The answer was, easy, it was probably one of the worse painting experiences of my early life. As the staff artist at the Hansen Planetarium, I was one of the only astronomical artists working in the city at the time. If I remember rightly, a fellow came in one day looking for someone to paint a mural for his auto dealership meeting room. The idea was to put his customers in relaxed frame of mind for the delicate negotiations surrounding a automobile sale. Again, always being short of cash, I readily agreed to paint the piece, simple I thought, since most of the background would be the black of empty space. Since it was not a planetarium project I needed to paint it in my apartment, small as it was. Fortunately the dealership manufactured a frame for me to stretch canvas on, another very difficult thing to do.

Using my trusty airbrush and many tubes of paint, I began the work. As you may know, an airbrush is a small, pencil-sized piece of equipment, fed by a rather inadequate sized cup that holds the paint. The airbrush generally sprays one small line at a time and the paint in the cup is used up rather quickly, especially when trying to cover a large area. The process was painfully slow and occupied my nights and weekends to the extent that friends began to wonder what had happened to me. My air compressor burned out from overuse and I had to buy a new one. I kept running out of paint from the small tubes that I used and the costs mounted. The dealer kept nagging me to finish and I kept changing the work around as things never seemed to come out in a balanced and well-designed sort of way. Suffice it to say, that after many mishaps and more time that I care to remember, it was finally finished and mounted on the wall of the dealership. Of course I had to come in and make a few more changes and adjustments, this thing would haunt me forever, I figured. But all things generally come to an end and everyone was eventually satisfied, except of course me, I never charge enough for my work and this was no exception. I swore that I would never do another thing like that ever again, and for 30 years, I kept that promise.

Of course now, I paint murals all the time at the museum. Still not an easy task for me, but one that is very enjoyable, especially when I have finally finished the painting.

(Below, a photo of me as a very much younger artist in front of my mural. You might mistake all that hair for another nebula on the painting.)

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Science Fiction Humor

In reading over my blogs of this last year, I am struck by the fact that most of them have really been quite depressing. So I have resolved to try to be more upbeat. And what can be more upbeat then humor?

Quite by accident, I got into cartooning in the early seventies, when friends of mine began publishing a science fiction fanzine. Way back then, a ‘zine’ was a way of self publishing your writing or art in a magazine-like format. It wasn’t easy, there were no copy centers then and xeroxing your work was a very expensive proposition. Many zines were done on a mimeograph machine if you had very little money to spend. To lighten up things in true magazine format, I was asked to do some science fiction cartoons for some of these local zines. The single panel ink cartoons I did soon evolved into traditional 3-4 panel cartoon strips which I had always wanted to do. From there it was an easy step to turn those cartoons into a book. (But that is another story.)

I began transforming some of those early single panel ink cartoons into color illustrations. The lighter subject matter was a good counterpoint to my more serious science fiction art. When Star Wars appeared on the scene in the mid-seventies I thought it was a good contrast to Star Trek, which had been around since the mid-sixties. I began mixing the two together in various situations, borrowing iconic scenes from the movies. It turned out to be quite successful and I began selling a lot of my paintings and cartoon books and learned a new term, mashup.

Over the years I have found these lighter illustrations to be a great stress reliever and were always fun to show at conventions. With the amazing number and variety of SF and fantasy movies and TV shows shows available today, I have no lack of material, just a lamentable lack of time and occasional stiff fingers. However, I am not ready to give up yet. Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours matching up some reference material for an amusing illustration idea that I hope to paint this winter. Just thinking about how people will react when they see it, gives me a pleasant, warm feeling on these very cold winter days.

(Below, one of my early Star Trek/Star Wars painting mashups.)

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Crimes against Humanity

After World War II, at the end of 1945 to the middle of 1946, several military tribunals were held to prosecute members of the German military and other of their political leaders who committed war crimes, in particular, the genocide of many, many millions of people otherwise known as the Holocaust. Most of these leaders were hanged and others imprisoned, generally for life. These people, by their policies, knowingly set out to destroy particular groups of people by their race, religion and national origin.

Let us now consider a developing situation in our modern times. What if there was a group of people, political leaders, captains of industry, bankers and financial heads who were deliberately perpetuating an economic policy that has now been proven, without a doubt, to be nothing short of being an extreme danger to the human race as a whole?

Let us further consider that time is rapidly disappearing to alter the situation, and the more we wait to correct this, the more an enormous financial burden will be placed on every human on this planet. Not to mention that the eventual death toll for doing nothing is potentially catastrophic, making the outrageous numbers of casualties in World War II seem paltry in comparison. So, would we need another tribunal?

Would we need to bring these people, the ones that prevented us from doing something that could have saved ourselves, to justice? But instead of execution, taking their fortunes to help begin to pay for the mitigation and damages that would occur worldwide. Would that be enough?

We certainly are not doing anything about the problem now. Do we wait for another 30 years before it is so obvious to everyone that we are on the brink of total disaster? Or until the end of the century when it is too late to save but a fraction of humanity? When will we act? When will these Crimes against Humanity become plain to see?

(My photo of the Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima. Famine, drought, pollution, forced migrations and the need to keep for us, the limited resources of the future, will we be driven to war again because of the selfishness and greed of a few?)

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The Palantír

I worked for the local newspaper for 28 years, off and on, and I learned a great deal about research and verifying sources of information. I was no reporter, but I did do an incredible amount of what was called informational graphics. Info graphics were generally small boxes of descriptive art and textual commentary focusing on any number of subjects usually tied to a story helping the reader interpret the material presented therein. I prided myself on accuracy and fully researched facts for these info graphics. In recent years the internet made this research much easier, just type in a subject and google it, pages and pages of material just waiting for you to verify or disprove your graphic point of view.

In J.R.R Tolkien’s epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, the wizard, Saruman, who owns a palantír, uses it to seek information and is snared by the evil lord Sauron. By selectively allowing Saruman to see only what Sauron wanted through the palantír, he was able to convince him to do his bidding.

It has occurred to me lately that the internet is much like the palantír. There are many who seek to relay their certain points of view. The distortion of facts, the twisting of historical narratives, pseudoscience and outright falsehoods exist in abundance. These people seek to drown out any of those who have differing views. In our open and free society, everyone has a right to their opinion, but we also have the right to ignore others opinions if we wish, or if it is proven to be a lie, we have the right and sacred duty to say what it really is, a lie.

(Below, my cube at the newspaper before they laid me off and a good portion of the staff. In my many years there at the newspaper, we never published a deliberate falsehood, never one instance of fake news. Without a free press, (guarantied by the very first Amendment of the US Constitution), we are much weaker as a democracy, much to the delight of many people in power today.)

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Into the Woods (Part 2)

During the week after my father’s death, while my brother, sister and I worked out all of the arrangements for my fathers funeral, Ashley and her friend, Nancy, painted as much as they could to help out with the exhibit work. When I came back to the museum, I found much of the foreground shrubs, trees and flowers were brilliantly done. But the autumn trees they painted didn’t look anything like the rest of the exhibit and some other details were not what I expected. Sadly, I had to repaint several parts of the exhibit to match the work that I had done so far, the director was not happy at the delay. At the end of March she had to submit a report and photographs of the finished exhibit to the main granting agency. It wasn’t going to happen, we were barely halfway there. We brought in some trees and made up a beaver pond out of bits and pieces and angled the photos populated with a number of Treehouse families and made do with it. The finished product would be much grander. April and May passed slowly with the daily slog of painting trees, branches and leaves, lots of leaves. An exhibit company began to cover frames made for the beaver pond and bear cave. A flat painted momma bear for the cave was not going to be impressive enough and so another exhibit fabricator was found to make a 3-D mother bear and cub. As I finished up the main walls, more panels surrounding the entrances were build and brought in. Massive walls that needed to be filled with trees and more leaves. Tired of waiting, the museum director set a finish date for the exhibit and then spent many days of her busy schedule painting foreground flowers, shrubs and bushes. It came down to spending every single day but two in July, painting. The beaver pond and the long stream was painted, animal and tree details were finished and several more birds were added to fill in blank spots. The cave and pond were finished and installed and the long finished animals fastened to the walls. A hundred and one details were also painted, all the bits and pieces that make up a whole had to be added. The exhibit would open during the museum’s annual special day, Get Ready for Kindergarten with Miss Bindergarten, (another excellent book series by Ashley). Arriving in the nick of time, Ashley helped the final day painting some details with me before the dedication, mere hours away. The exhibit was overwhelmed by curious museum goers anxious to see what had been hidden by the walls all those months. The general acclaim for the beauty of the space was pleasant to hear, but as one mother and child were leaving, she asked, “what happened to the music room?” (The former exhibit that we replaced). Sadly, I was too surprised and did not have a good answer for that. (Below, some of the finish work of the exhibit.)

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Into the Woods (Part 1)

It all started innocently enough early last summer, 2017. My wife Lynne, Executive Director of the Treehouse Children’s Museum had a exhibit painting job for me, if I wanted it. Well sure, painting, money, my two favorite things. It was a rather large space that she was going to fill with a forest called a Walk in the Woods. Loosely based on several children’s books (Baby Bear series) written and illustrated by Ashley Wolff, a good friend of ours. Just to see if it was at all possible, would I do a scale model first? I have always enjoyed doing models of almost anything, so I set out with measurements and floor plans and built the model out of foam core, mat board and Styrofoam. It turned out quite well, exquisitely painted, down to the last detail, animals, plants, trees, walls of a forest in all the four seasons, a beaver pond, and a large cave for mama bear and her cub. Little did I realize that at that scale, 1 foot to 1/2 inch, those tiny trees on the model would later become quite daunting to paint. The director and exhibit team reviewed the model and after some changes and adjustments the exhibit proposal was approved. At the end of September, the existing exhibits were removed, the area fenced off and I brought in my painting equipment and many, many gallons of paint. Looking around at the vast area to fill, I realized that it just wasn’t going to be enough. Ashley arrived for a week of hectic illustrating of the many animal cutouts, getting the majority of them started and quite a few finished. I settled in for good two months of off and on work, finishing up the critters and making a number of new ones to fill in the forest spaces. Slowly, through November and December wall cutouts were put up and primed and based in with basic colors, light green for spring, darker green for summer and fall fading into yellow for autumn and dark blue for a cold winters night. The walls around the cave were marked out with the winter constellations and fiber optic lines were run for the stars shinning in the night sky. By January 1st, I was ready to begin painting in the trees. For a dimensional effect, more cutouts were made for the foreground bushes and such, all of which had to be primed, based and painted. With my electric lift I was able to raise myself up and down the 11 foot tall walls and roll back and forth on the 15 foot long wall spaces. It made it much easier then climbing up and down and moving ladders every time I changed position. Tree trunks and branches were first, then filling in background color and moving forward in value and tone. Each leaf had to be painted in and then applied a second coat to cover the background. Then each leaf was detailed with veins, trunks detailed and foreground shrubs and trees included. January faded into a cold February and the summer wall was finally finished first, due to having to be ready to accommodate the building of the beaver pond. Spring was painted and autumn started, Ashley was scheduled to arrive in early March to help with the work. Then my father died suddenly, coming back to his house after getting the mail. I stopped work, devastated. (Below, the model of the exhibit and early views of the trees and animals with Ashley and I.)

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Boomer Bust Redux

So where are we now? The baby boomers control the political process and until they loose that control, nothing good or constructive, to solving the many problems in our country today, is going to get done. Yes, I said that, I will shout it out if I need to. We are now at a point that the younger generations have enough voting power to unseat the boomers. It needs to be done, and soon. Time is short, we have until the middle of the next decade, 2025 at the latest. After that, I think we really are screwed, we will have reached the point of no return. The choice of whether or not to save the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and stop the rise of the worlds oceans and all the destabilizing climatic events that will follow is critical. Solving the many social and economic problems that are growing larger in this country, will require a greater and greater amount of money the longer we wait. Money from taxes on people who do not have to pay much now due to recent and ongoing tax cuts. Wealthy people who see that as privilege, and they have bought and paid for that privilege in the politicians that they control, that the boomers control. It is also very advantageous to them to keep the country divided socially, any organized movement to solidify a voting bloc against them has been so far, successfully prevented. Without any unity, we cannot move forward on issues that concern the welfare of all of us, not just the rich.

The boomers inherited the prosperity of their parents, who struggled through the great depression and WWII to build a robust society and economy. We, the boomers, never had to sacrifice or work very hard to get to where we are today. I have been fairly comfortable all my life, the future without that comfort frightens me very much. The boomers like me are exceptionally motivated to keep that comfort and control. And as a result of all this, the next generations will have to sacrifice in ways that we cannot possibly imagine. Do they have the will and fortitude to do so? For the sake of our country, our planet and our civilization, I sincerely hope so. (Below, Lynne, me and Robert, our only child, September, 1983. Did we doom his future for our present comfort?)

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