The Naked Silo

STAR TREK: I've been a Star Trek fan since I was a wee lad in the mid-1970s, watching the original series in repeats (aside from a so-so cartoon, that's all there was!). Then came the movies, then The Next Generation, then Deep Space Nine, then Voyager, and so on. I like much of it, ignore some of it (hello, Enterprise; hello, Mr. Abrams), and more or less tolerate the rest. Star Trek and Star Wars have been of great interest to me for most of my life, and yet they rarely appear in my main body of artwork (only one Star Trek painting !), but sometimes, like my C-3PO  and spaceship models, my fandom/appreciation still finds –often unexpected– ways of manifesting itself. ORIGINS: This weird, silly little project began when I was searching for something online and, unrelated to my search, saw a photo of Jim Kirk in a Hawaiian shirt in the format of a motivational poster with the caption "Casual Fridays" underneath. I thought it was a funny idea, but I found th...

I was born in 1971 yet I somehow didn't get to see Star Wars during its first release in 1977, but I collected the trading cards, comic books, and a handful of action figures; having only cursory knowledge of the story didn't matter to me: I was entranced by that universe and I still am to this day.  The first two action figures I got were R2-D2 and C-3PO . I absolutely love their designs and when I saw an in-box review of the new Bandai 1/12 scale Threepio snap kit a few months ago (and saw how super shiny the gold was!) I knew I had to build one myself as one of the many scale model projects assigned to the Small Pond Shipyard . At first I thought I should keep him shiny to show off the amazing reflectivity, but thinking back to some of the first images I saw of him (and the first time we meet him in the movie), he was already kind of tarnished...and by the time he meets Luke on Tattooine, he's dusty, banged up, and he's been fitted with a restraining b...

Decades ago, when I was somewhere between 3 and 6 years old, I saw a scale model of a hospital that held my fascination for a very long time... It sorta looked like this; ...was roughly the size of this; ...and had minimal details like this. My family was either visiting someone in the hospital (in Toronto?) or it could have even been in 1976 when my sister was born –I have no way of knowing the circumstances– but I remember quite vividly seeing in the lobby a model of the hospital that we were in. Now, I wasn't unfamiliar with miniatures by any means –I had toys, after all– but this was the largest one I'd seen in real life. I remember the blocks of white buildings, the chunky primary-coloured cars, the tiny green trees, I think there might have been some mini people, too (so, I guess it's not  that  vivid a memory after all –but not bad considering it's about 40 years later). Although the memory of that model has lasted all these years, it...

When she came upon us, I heard them say, "From a silver angel, a cloud of grey" The sky was falling, the future calling Lady Armageddon's here today These words are from from Canadian singer-songwriter  Gary O' s 1984 song  Shades of 45 ,  and they've haunted me for decades, as has the whole threat of all-out nuclear war. I've recently been examining my own relationship with The Bomb and Cold War paranoia/propaganda in the pages of Picton's local comics anthology,  Marmalade , entitled  Trinity . While researching and brainstorming ideas for my little photo comic adventure, I made this quick and slightly horrific illustration in Photoshop of a giant skeleton riding the Enola Gay, on her way to drop the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima: This is only a test. Getting back into modeling after a 15-year hiatus, I wondered if I could build a little version of this illustration...then I looked for suitable raw materials... Parts. ...