Sci-Fi Fine Art So Far

Awakening Upon Death of the Bride of the Creature

The Human Fly, by Eric Kuns, digital image

Here’s a gallery of my recent art that is about science fiction directly, influenced by it, or I think would appeal to people who like it. Click on any of the images to go into the gallery. [You can see the same images at the bottom, where you can click on them for full screen view, and follow a link for an in-depth post on the piece.]

Sci-fi is a big influence on my art, mostly from a nostalgic perspective. When I was a kid, sci-fi movies were my fine art – an imaginative leap into the mysterious, unknown, transcendent. Each week when the TV guide would arrive, I’d pour through it and circle all the sci-fi movies. It was always best if there was a monster, or a robot. I didn’t care for horror or fantasy though, as for me those genres didn’t capture my imagination, and weren’t as scary or fantastic as something like the Outer Limits.

The original Battlestar Gallactica used to come on Sunday nights, and I’d plan my week around it (to the degree I did any planning at all). I can vividly remember a TV Guide cover that showed the wires and mechanisms inside the Six Million Dollar Man’s forearm. And there was a billboard for one of the Planet of the Apes series that emblazoned itself on my imagination. I saw it from the back seat of my parents car as we drove by it on the highway, and never forgot it.

I was a working class kid with a used B&W TV and a library card. I never saw Star Wars in the movie theater. I saw it years after it came out, on a TV at summer school playground. So there was always a longing to be immersed in these fantastic sci-fi landscapes which couldn’t be immediately satisfied. I had to make my own sci-fi art. Lots of robots, aliens, monsters and space ships. I even still have a lot of them, tucked away with hundreds of other early pieces.

I don’t think of myself as a Sci-Fi artist at all, because I’m not a genre artist. People like the familiar and the easy-to-classify. I refuse to do it. A long time ago Sci-Fi stopped representing the transcendent for me (and by “transcendent” I just mean something that engages us beyond boring, quotidian existence). I got heavily immersed in music, and then Fine Art, and literature, and later I focused on non-fiction.

When I use Sci-Fi themes in the present, it’s partly out of my immediate interest, but also autobiographical, because it harkens back to the thing I found the most exciting and interesting when I was a kid. I say it’s “Sci-Fi Fine Art” because I have a “fine art” background, including a master’s. Believe me, my art education had absolutely nothing to do with the art I am doing now. My graduate thesis was an installation. Now that I’m not in art school, and because I’m an independent artist (I don’t sell through a gallery and am not a part of the art institution), I can do whatever the F I want, so I do precisely what I love. I assume that if I like it, other discerning viewers will, too.

And now the same images again. Click for full view, and follow the links for posts dedicated to the piece in question, usually with close-ups, my intended meaning, and other goodies.

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