Artomatic 2008 update

A quick update on Artomatic...

Opening night was great. My friends came out to support me and I met lots of the other artists.

"Meet the Artists night" was great too. I brought cookies:
Some folks were afraid to eat them because they thought maybe they were part of the exhibit :)

It was fun to talk to people and get feedback on my artwork, although I found that more people wanted to talk to me about whether or not we really went to the Moon, or why we are going back to the Moon, and so on. Usually I really enjoy those conversations with the general public, but you know, I kinda just wanted to be an artist and not a NASA representative for one night.

I actually sold two pieces, which totally made my night (thanks Steve).

As promised, here are a couple of other pics...

Sean, my partition buddy, on opening night.

Some of my favorite things, mostly from the 7th floor:
A photo doesn't do justice to a mobile, you have to see it in motion, but this mobile is possible my favorite thing in the entire show. It so doesn't look like it should work.

This chair is made out of pop can tops. Wow.

I love the vibrant colors in these paintings.

These are just fun.

Fire Dancers - very cool.

Phoenix has landed!

Congrats to the Phoenix team on their successful landing on Mars!

I went to a talk last week by Fuk Li, the manager of JPL's Mars Exploration Program, where he basically spent an hour going through all the different ways that things could go wrong with the landing, listing all of the hundreds of little things that had to work perfectly, including a few things that are out of NASA's control, like what happens if you land cockeyed on a big rock? And I have to admit that I walked out of that talk a little worried. It's really hard to land on Mars, really hard. But, you know what, NASA is really good at what it does. Way to go guys!

Artomatic 2008

So I'm participating in an enormous art show that opens this week called Artomatic. If you're in or near DC in the next month, you should stop by and check it out. There will be over a thousand artists, including over 800 visual artists of every stripe, plus two music stages, a theater space, dance space, a poetry room, a film room, a classroom, a tattoo parlor, open mics, performance art, fire dancing, burlesque, and more. It's going to be quite a spectacle. Go to the website for all the details.


I finally put the finishing touches on my space last night. Here are a few pictures of how I put it all together over the last couple of weeks. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but boy was it a lot of work.


This is my spot on the 7th floor, strategically near the stairs and the bathrooms.



My partition neighbor Sean, aka SecretWorm is a digital/graffiti artist and his concept was to make his wall look like a graffitied city street, which is really cool, but almost overwhelming visually, so I wanted something bold and clean that would balance and contrast that.


Here it is after spackling, sanding and the first coat of paint. The paint, which is blue even though it looks white in this picture, is the leftovers from when I painted my apartment in Providence, thus proving that carrying that bucket of paint back and forth across the country three times was totally worth it.


Here it is with all the painting finished. I think it looks pretty cool, but I wish I had done the lettering a little neater, maybe used stencils or something. Live and learn.


And here is the almost final state. I wish I had cleaned up my mess before I took the last picture but I was just so excited to have everything hung.

I'll take some at the opening on Friday.

New Paintings

A couple new paintings...

Send your name to the Moon

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team would like to invite you to send your name to the Moon onboard the LRO spacecraft:

http://lro.jhuapl.edu/NameToMoon/index.php

Unfortunately, it's just on the orbiter, so it looks like your name won't actually make it to the lunar surface (unless it crashes). They should totally put the names on the LCROSS part that is supposed to crash, that would be way cooler.

My name is already en route to the asteroid belt on board DAWN and it crashed into a comet on board Deep Impact, and I think I may be headed to Mercury on MESSENGER too, so I'm making some progress on spreading a little bit of me throughout the solar system.