19 January 2011

The Toymaker

The creative impulse takes many forms and often comes from a place of frustration with what's out there not living up to the potential you can see.

When I was a kid, I made many of my own toys.  All of my favorite toy guns came from the crates of miscellaneous junk beneath my grandfather's work bench, not Toys-R-Us.  This isn't because we were poor, but because I thought the toys I envisioned in my head were just that much cooler than the ones you could buy at the toy store.  For instance, the 1980's were woefully short of space helmets and other spaceman spiffery.  I was born twenty years too late for the real teeth of the space race and all the very cool toys that accompanied that space-borne fervor.

Thankfully, my parents and grandparents encouraged this sort of thing.  At least until I went as far as getting into pounding heated nails into tiny swords for my GI Joes.  Dad drew the line at me becoming an eight-year-old blacksmith.

Even those toys I did buy or was given eventually went under the tools.  All of my favorite GI Joe and Star Wars characters and vehicles were custom amalgamations to suit my own fancy, characters in my own extended storylines.

As an adult, I transferred this into sculpture and artwork, but really these are all extensions of the same brain frequency, the translation of a mental picture into a three-dimensional object.  I've made props for renaissance faires and small theatrical productions and science fiction conventions.

My name is Scott and I like to build neat stuff.  I am a Maker and a Modifier, in short, I am a Toymaker and these are my toys.

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