Back in 2006, I was invited to create an illustration for a traveling exhibit sponsored by the Society of Illustrators. The theme is You must have been a Beautiful Baby. Fifty illustrators were asked to create a piece of artwork that depicted them at some point before their 12th birthday.
I chose a version of my nine-year-old self and painted a picture of me looking through the Bionic eye of my Col. Steve Austin doll.
The show is still on the move. It is about to make an appearance in Plainview Texas this fall.
I dug out the artist's statement. It is below.
The Bionic Illustrator?
You may remember an action show from the seventies called The Six Million Dollar Man. It starred Lee Majors as Colonel Steve Austin, an astronaut who was badly injured in an airplane crash. They rebuilt his battered body with bionic parts, which gave him super-human strength. Each episode would feature him getting caught up in some crime-solving melee’, culminating in him moving on to another town, so his identity wouldn’t be discovered.
As a kid, I dreamed of being Mrs. Colonel Austin. But Steve was the same as every good super hero. He could never be in a committed relationship.
The show spawned an action figure of Steve that had a futuristic bionic arm. That arm, of course, was the first thing to get broken off. The Steve doll also had a hole in the back of its head. This allowed you to look in and see what the Bionic Man might be viewing through his incredible Bionic eye. This feature required the doll to have an empty eye socket on his face. As a child, I thought this was really cool. As an adult, I find this disturbing.
When I fast-forward to present day, I realize that things turned out pretty well for me. Ok, I don’t have a Bionic husband who can leap 16-foot chain-link fences or witness a crime in progress half a mile away. But all in all, he’s a pretty good guy. Heck, he let me keep all of my old toys.
Media: Watercolor on Paper
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