Sad and heavy news today as Redmoon announced their closing. If ever I had an artistic home (that wasn't me, hermit-like at home) Redmoon Theater was that place. Redmoon gave me the opportunity to lead a team of talented illustrators in creating an ink and shadow science fantasy world projected onto the Museum of Contemporary art, later that year (2010) allowing me to paint cows in space, then letting me draw and co-create the bonkers story of a drunken sailor on hundreds of feet of scroll set to classical music and performed at Symphony Hall, design work, painting human scale pop-up books, puppets… what a place. A place where spectacle, incredible work ethic and uncensored imagination made magic.
…When I was a kid I watched and rewatched Star Wars innumerable times. I built robots out of empty five gallon plaster buckets and cardboard boxes. I was at the same time enamored with the magic of the world they created and inspired to build things that could live in that world. Movies (generally speaking) and certainly Star Wars have lost that element, but it's what Redmoon has done so well—creating a world of magic and wonderment, but letting you see the craft, the hand in it. The magic at Redmoon didn't just appear through some arcane conjuring, it was built.
So this drawing here is a bit of an epitaph. Some may recall rumblings of a "space band" here on woodenwater earlier this year… well that was to be a Redmoon collaboration for this year's Winter Pageant. Unfortunately the Curio guys and myself couldn't make it work because of scheduling. The idea was for it to be my songwriting powered by Curio's grit—parts Ornette Coleman and David Bowie, Mary Halvorson and Man or Astroman?, Giacomo Balla and Svengoolie. Maybe that can happen someday, but when and where remains to be seen.
Homes change, be they artistic or domestic. Despite that change, the people remain—living or dead, present or distant, together or separated—they remain. Although home may smolder into glowing embers, we build again. And what that new construction will be… only the future can tell.
…When I was a kid I watched and rewatched Star Wars innumerable times. I built robots out of empty five gallon plaster buckets and cardboard boxes. I was at the same time enamored with the magic of the world they created and inspired to build things that could live in that world. Movies (generally speaking) and certainly Star Wars have lost that element, but it's what Redmoon has done so well—creating a world of magic and wonderment, but letting you see the craft, the hand in it. The magic at Redmoon didn't just appear through some arcane conjuring, it was built.
So this drawing here is a bit of an epitaph. Some may recall rumblings of a "space band" here on woodenwater earlier this year… well that was to be a Redmoon collaboration for this year's Winter Pageant. Unfortunately the Curio guys and myself couldn't make it work because of scheduling. The idea was for it to be my songwriting powered by Curio's grit—parts Ornette Coleman and David Bowie, Mary Halvorson and Man or Astroman?, Giacomo Balla and Svengoolie. Maybe that can happen someday, but when and where remains to be seen.
Homes change, be they artistic or domestic. Despite that change, the people remain—living or dead, present or distant, together or separated—they remain. Although home may smolder into glowing embers, we build again. And what that new construction will be… only the future can tell.
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