Space Art Presentation

Last Thursday I gave my Art and the Exploration of Space talk to the Lake Barrington Shores Men's Club. Lake Barrington Shores is a gated community north of Barrington IL. I was surprised to learn that one of the ladies in the audience had been the Maid of honor at Neil Armstrong's wedding. Fortunately I did get to speak with her briefly about some of her recollections of Neil and his days as an Apollo astronaut. I was also surprised to see several works of space art on display – provided by a friend of one of the club members. It was also a pleasure to speak with a fellow space art aficionado.

Somewhat on the impulsive side, a few days before I was slated to give this talk I decided to totally redo my presentation. I'd first given this particular space art talk in 2009 and had made no substantive changes to it during the intervening years. Turns out I was working on the new version right up until midnight the night before I was set to give it. In hindsight, I'm glad that I made that impulsive decision because the changes and additions improved the quality of the presentation.

Cosmetically I restructured all the slides so that I could enlarge the space art that appeared on each slide. More importantly I added a section on space art used specifically to illustrate future space development concepts like space solar power, asteroid mining, and space tourism. This allowed me to not only broaden the scope of the space art I discussed but also allowed me to introduce the associated concepts to my audience. I also added a section on the use of space art to illustrate newspace ventures. This allowed me to discuss the newspace paradigm of space exploration. I should point out that as President of the Chicago Society for Space Studies, my principal presentation is The NewSpace Frontier.

I also added in some of my own space art to extend on some of the topic areas I was addressing. Being able to speak on a first-hand basis about my own art strengthened the points that I was attempting to make.

During my presentation I took the opportunity to put in a plug for the National Space Society's Roadmap to Space Settlement 2014 International Student Art Contest for which I am one of the art judges. I also brought along a stack of complimentary copies of Ad Astra – the space magazine published by National Space Society.

It was a very enjoyable experience for me – made even more enjoyable by the number of questions I got after completing my talk. For more about my art presentations, I have a PDF on my web site that contains summary information:
The Presentations, Lectures, and Classes of Jim Plaxco PDF.

| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Thursday, December 19th, 2013 at 11:48 am and is filed under Presentations, Space Art, Space Exploration.