Getting started...otra vez.

From an early age I have always been attracted to the visual arts. Even though the obligations of supporting a family led me into the corporate fields of marketing and sales support in several Direct Sales companies such as Avon, Amway and Shaklee, over the years I have never stopped painting, drawing and shooting pictures. At Fullerton my curriculum included the fine arts, graphic design and photography, and later in Argentina I studied painting with Raúl Russo, Domingo Mendez Terrero, and Miguel Warnes. Until now, along with my wife who in her own right is an accomplished portrait artist and painter, we have only participated in a handful of collective exhibitions. There never seemed to be enough time or the right circumstances to seek opportunities to take our work to professional or commercial levels. However, it appears that the time has arrived to bring these works out into a more public environment. And I’ve decided to show off a little bit of everything




To get the ball and the blog rolling, I'll start with something that's both old and new.  Space Art



Visiting memory lane, I sent to a good friend a file containing some juvenile work to compare with a few more recent space works. And my buen amigo who just happens to work at NASA’s Ames Facility, pointed out that maybe it was time to launch into new program. So late last year, HainArt came into existence. Obviously I had grown up in the splendorous light of the pioneering years of the U.S. Space Program. Coupled with those wee-hour wake up calls during the early sixties filled with many scrubs and those heart pounding triumphs, I consumed and collected large quantities of Sci-Fi’s Great Generation…Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlein, Herbert, Niven, Harrison, Le Guin, Vance, C.S. Lewis, Wells, Sturgeon, de Camp, Leiber and on to many many others. At the end of the decade during another one of those early mornings, I watched Armstrong come down the ladder on that fuzzy B&W screen with my only months old son sitting on my lap. And I still have the hope to be around when we go back.



So it really isn’t really that strange that while paintings (abstracts and landscapes) have piled up, I did produce a small quantity of “space art” illustrations in acrylics and ink following a path leading directly from childhood notebooks. They are a series of “naves” or perhaps “spaceclippers,” vaguely inspired at first by Stanley Bonstell and Life’s coverage of NASA’s first triumphs and disasters. Later I was struck by Roger Dean’s work for the the Yes record jackets and especially for his creation of Jon Anderson’s Olias of Sunhillow (1974). And finally Joe Haldeman’s descriptions of a spaceship in his “The Forever War” (1976), pushed the last button. The earliest of these works date back to around 1980. Only ink on paper they slowly evolved into full color acrylics, and the others have followed slowly during the next years.



Perhaps it is time that they should be allowed to sail out into the open.  So being a new first time blogger, here goes the first timid launch.