Jack White 13

In 1957 a stray Soviet dog by the name of Laika became the first animal in space. She died within hours due to overheating and the likely truth is that there was no expectations of her survival to begin with. The whole experiment was sold as some sort of necessary precursor for human missions into space. Can you imagine what the reaction would be to this today?  

This was another collaboration with Rob Jones who really has a knack for pairing the right tones and historical events to Jack’s music. The Laika illustration was built out of stars, nebulas, galaxies and other bits I coined space dust. My hope was that she would look well traveled, like she’d been on a journey and is now orbiting Earth once again. In some of the early roughs Jack felt like she didn’t look enough like Laika and I had an “a ha” moment at the end where I added a solar eclipse that would double as a helmet.  

NOTES: 24 x 18 inches /// 4 screens /// signed and numbered artist edition of 300 /// numbers 121-300 sold at show /// September 24, 2014 at Township Auditorium in Columbia, SC