A review of the trip I took to the Susquehanna Art Museum, in Harrisburg
Pennsylvania. They were showing the 'Frank Collection' which is billed as
the largest private holding of Science Fiction art.
http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/ARHU/Depts/ArtGal/.WWW/exhibit/99-0
0/sfiction/catalogues.htm#FRANK
(Yeah I know, too big a link)
I went thinking I'd see hundreds of paintings, or at least one hundred.
Instead the showing was a part of a part of the collection, about forty. But
the items that were there were impressive. All of the paintings were the
basis for covers of books and magazines, with some computer games thrown in.
Actually I'm wondering now how many were just made and someone decided to
use it for a cover and how many were commissioned specifically for a book.
I'm not one to stare at a painting for minutes, looking at every square cm
for meaning or some little detail, (more on this later), so there were many
that I gave a quick look over and moved on. I wish I had a notebook to write
down the names of the paintings that I did notice. But what did stop me, and
it was twelve paintings in depending on how you counted, was the cover for
Iain Banks Excession, painting by Paul Young (the singer?). The size was 40
x 100 cm, from the spaceship on the right to the end of the transport tube.
The ship was just hanging there and it looked so big.
The best for me was the cover for Heinlein's The Number of the Beast. I
won't give it away but there was an 'oh wow!' spark, something I've never
seen when I looked at the cover. The collection book actually shows two
paintings for that book. Another nice painting was for a Simac(?) cover, it
said the book won the Hugo and Nebula. A third was a cover that showed
rabbit looking aliens in a house poking through things.
Additionally there was a display called Pop Mechanics which was scientific
sculptures or mechanical things. For instance there was a large, 1m x 1m,
type of sprio giro drawing machine, which mostly drew on it's own. (It had
to be adjusted up or down by hand.) A room had little dancing objects that
looked like a cross between chess pieces and satellite dishes. The master
piece however was a large picture of a suburban house made from lite-brite
thinges. This was about 1.2 m x 1.4 m, maybe larger. It was almost perfect,
even with off colors.
Lastly they had a section of student art and writing, high schoolers. Some
of it was very good. One was an ink drawing of the Eiffel tower, like you
were standing very near it and looking up. If you were more than a meter
from the drawing it looked like a picture. This is my favorite art, not that
it has to look perfect, just that it looks real to me. That picture I did
look at for ten minutes.
Overall a nice showing. See it if you can.
Kevin Tarr
Trump high, lead low
