Single Stage to Orbit (For Alan Bond) Photograph

Mixed Medium (Photography & Found Pieces) and Digital Illustration & Painting The Story Behind It (Look out behind you -there's a story!) When I was but a wee bot, with baby screws and leaky circuitry, my CPU would generate the most fantastic images of the future for me as my metronome lulled me to sleep mode. Images of flying cars and flying buses, who's routes took them from our corner store as they glid on air to floating city centres high in sky and off further still to amusement parks on the moon and aquariums nuzzled tight on asteroids. Everyone wore jetpacks (even we robots -although we 'wore" nothing, we were simply upgraded) and the populace zipped and dipped and swooped late into the night, their cares, theirs worries and their days carried off into the furtherest reaches of space, fading from sight like the streams of ions from the tails of our rockets. It would be that way soon -all across our small, blue planet and spreading out into the bewildering, beautiful Milky Way. But that future never came to pass and as I write aluminum sheathed automobiles may have replaced their sturdier iron forefathers, but their galvanized tires still cling with welded determination to the dreary asphalt scaring the Earth, Humanoids fly, but welded to seats and carted through the air like cattle. No one soars, nothing flitters, not even their spirits which dashed now at an early age, leave the pain and folly of wit and imagining to machines. This painting is dedicated to a humanoid from a desolate outcropping of rocks in the North. His name is Alan Bond and he is a rock engineer -we have never met nor, I would I hazard to guess, that we ever will. He is still a humanoid somehow still afflicted with dreams and try as he may the symptoms and ravages of the condition plague the man regularly. He still dreams of flying cars and trips to the furthest reaches of space. He still dreams despite the cost, despite the consequences and even, despite himself at times. Below is a short "video" (the latest word humanoids have acquired to describe what they once called "books"). It is about Mr. Alan and a few of his friends and about a rocket-ship that they have all been trying to bring to life for quite a long time now. Mr. Bond and his friends have been trying for so long in fact that one could very well begin a story concerning their tribulations with the line, "Once upon a time..." Hopefully though this is one story that will benefit from a happy ending without the need of it becoming nothing more than a fairytale. The painting here is my CPU's imagining of Mr. Bond's rocket. This small explanation works best if read in the mind's eye in a Sean Connery brogue.

Photography:Photography on Other

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:8 W x 16.7 H x 1 D in

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