Leonard

One of our favorite science fiction characters died recently. I say ours because I don’t know anyone who didn’t like the man or the character he played. I am referring, of course, to Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock. When Star Trek premiered in 1966 I was a young teenager and it was my first exposure to science fiction. I couldn’t have asked for a better guide. Star Trek took on many of the social issues in the sixties and believe me, there were a heck of a lot of social issues back then. (Not that there aren’t any now, but people didn’t talk about them before, much less do television shows.) This show happened during the exciting days of the Gemini and Apollo space programs and Star Trek not only depicted us successfully living in space but we were already exploring the galaxy! There was a multinational crew and there were also aliens working with us. Mr. Spock, (from the planet Vulcan), was mostly human because his father married a human, so he was half-vulcan and half-human. This set up a quite interesting dilemma for poor Mr. Spock, he could sympathize with humans but he preferred to be Vulcan and Vulcans were logical, unemotional people. Being thrown into a crew of emotional humans was quite a chore and as an actor who had to act without showing emotion it was also very difficult. Leonard Nimoy appeared to do this with ease, creating a surprisingly sympathetic alien character and so won our hearts and minds.

Over the years I was able to meet almost every major Star Trek actor at science fiction conventions around the country. Unhappily, I never had the chance to meet Mr. Nimoy. I have, however, used his image in some of the paintings that I have done. The one below was for a fan-published book about the character whose title escapes my mental recall at the moment. It was a fun painting and yes, the farmhouse had something to do with the story. There must be many, many thousands of paintings of the character, Mr. Spock, done over the years. But I have to say that I like mine pretty well, and that of course, is only logical.