Ballardilicious

The Brain in the Jar over at The New York Moon, the lofty Zack Sultan, asked if I wanted to accompany a piece on sci-fi/futurist/fetishist short fiction writer J.G. Ballard. The article itself is a careening car wreck with heels on, filled with sound waves and Italians, so I had to say yes. Zack sent me an amazing little doodle of Tintin-Ballard as an oscilloscope readout and I took it from there.

The machine is total fiction, used perhaps on an old Star Trek set to serve as a facsimile of science; one raises and lowers energy shields by twisting a few knobs and pulling some levers. New quarks are named by flipping a few switches. The labeling on this abomination comes from a Ballard interview about airports:

“Together they constitute the reality of our lives, rather than some mythical domain of village greens, cathedral closes and manorial vistas. Much as I admire, say, Syon House, now home to a huge garden centre and a venue for business entertaining, I feel more at home driving through an office park like the New Square complex at Bedfont, its hi-tech corporate hangars only a javelin’s throw from the Heathrow perimeter road, and surely influenced by the proximity of all those 747 tailplanes that cruise the tarmac like the fins of amiable sharks.”

My gaudy color schemes wouldn’t really fit in this drawing, so I tried to make it cool to the touch, slightly halated, with some panic-button red thrown in as visual anchors. The large diagonal cast shadow is supposed to appear as if it’s crawling across the panel, in motion because we are perhaps in a spaceship spinning like a bullet while orbiting the bright side of the moon.

Likenesses are hard for me, so I also wanted to create a kind of narrative space around him as a context to augment the portrait. For the portrait itself, I looked at the way Andrew Jackson was engraved from the back of a twenty (that I scanned a long time ago. I don’t have any money laying around. Imagine that. By the way, did you know that Photoshop won’t accept scanned images of money? It brings up a dialog box slapping your wrist for attempting to counter-fit.)

After I finished it, I drew this cookie for Lawrence.com: