Soundlessly, you continue to fall through space. The moon brushes past your toes, but your feet find no purchase. You are not the first one here, and you are interrupting something important. As you tumble past the dusty craters, you brush against the stars, which twinkle like tinsel in the fluorescent lights.
> Continue falling
🐚
Space Tim is an ode to the fragmented experience of youth, where dreams and fantasies flailingly distract from a world that a child can neither relate to nor understand, where the weight of that world and its history can be explained and re-explained by an adult without seeming like more than a boring story.
This painting fuses my experience of growing up in the shadow of World War II and the Space Race with the dreams and ambitions my son has at age 12. As a boy I doodled on my spiral notebook paper, producing a stream of mostly-incoherent doodles, puns, and plans. While my mom tried to teach me about the space race I dreamt of being an author or an artist, or perhaps making comics, or (okay, yeah) an astronaut.
My son dreams of YouTube stardom, and as I try to teach the important parts of history to him, I see the same divide in him. His dreaming, planning, building mind burns brightly, but the world around him diminishes in that determined light. We may have different dreams, but looking out the window through an important lesson transcends the generations.
This painting fuses my experience of growing up in the shadow of World War II and the Space Race with the dreams and ambitions my son has at age 12. As a boy I doodled on my spiral notebook paper, producing a stream of mostly-incoherent doodles, puns, and plans. While my mom tried to teach me about the space race I dreamt of being an author or an artist, or perhaps making comics, or (okay, yeah) an astronaut.
My son dreams of YouTube stardom, and as I try to teach the important parts of history to him, I see the same divide in him. His dreaming, planning, building mind burns brightly, but the world around him diminishes in that determined light. We may have different dreams, but looking out the window through an important lesson transcends the generations.
The Hylozoist is a long-form digital project I began in February 2020. Each painting tells a story, and each painting tells another story when viewed in context. Also, each painting can be followed to the next painting in the series if you follow the most interesting thing in the scene.
To see more paintings from the project, click here.
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