Today was not a good day, and I would very much like to crawl under a rock.
Aside from everything else that’s going on, I thought I’d take my live show paperwork to work to finish it during break and lunch. Not only did that not happen, I didn’t discover until I got home that had left it all at work, so now I won’t be able to work on it at all today at home, either.
So now I can’t finish it until tomorrow, when I had planned on getting to bed early and catch a couple extra hours of sleep, since I am not going to get much on Saturday because of the scheduling conflict I mentioned before.
That’s just awesome. And pretty much par for the course this week.
Since I never got around to my Chicago Worldcon report (those notes are also with the live show paperwork. Like I said, not a good day), I want to at least highlight one of the things I bought there: a tiny piece of art I bought from a dealer who had purchased the archives from the estate of Virgil Finlay.
I wasn’t comfortable buying one of the dealer’s more expensive pieces, but I thought this item – a cover proof from his time illustrating astrology magazines – was both very affordable, and so very, very on point for me, as a horse person attending The Science Fiction Convention in Chicago. The spot colors were also a plus: a very Breyer-esque Blue and Yellow!
I may get it framed some time in the future, but for now it’s just going to reside in my ephemera archives.
Virgil Finlay has always been one of my favorite science-fiction illustrators, and the dream would be to own one of his originals. The dealer had some sketches of horses (not full-on, finished artwork) that were a temptation, but maybe another day, or another lifetime.
Some of his artwork was on display in the Korshak Collection room at Worldcon – in addition to works by Frank R. Paul, Hannes Bok, Emsh, the Brothers Hildebrandt, and so many others – but the piece that really caught my eye there was Stanley Meltzoff’s cover illustration for the paperback edition of Robert Heinlein’s The Green Hills of Earth. It had a beautiful, painterly quality to it that reproduction just cannot capture. If there was one painting in that room I could have stolen, it would have been that!
(Just being in that room was one of the many highlights of Worldcon.)
4 comments:
I had no idea cons had displays like that, what a treat! Here's to hoping you really enjoy at least some of your weekend
this might be an odd question, but have there ever been model unicorns- breyer or otherwise, that are more heraldic designed? with cloven hooves or beards or a long tufted tail? I'm a sucker for unicorns but I feel like I've only seen the kind that look like a horse got into the ice cream shop.
hope this finds you well!!
sanmari
I know one of the earlier Breyer unicorns on the Running Stallion mold had a beard in addition to the horn. I agree, I keep looking for lion tails and cloven hooves in addition to the horn. https://identifyyourbreyer.com/Images2/210d.jpg
That's an incredibly nice piece of art. Congratulations!
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