Entry tags:
hall of mystery
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Page 55 of the book Thrift Store Paintings shows two pulp-like paintings involving large robots. A robot bursts out of a packing box. A robot menaces two young women. They were interesting, but it was only when Cathy persuaded me to go see an art exhibition at Old Dominion University that I really appreciated the artist, Danny Hall.
The gallery, which occupied a former storefront on Granby Street in Norfolk, VA, consisted of just about all the paintings in the book, and more. I was pleased to see more canvases by Roehl, whose off-kilter images might have influenced me afterwards. The real revelation was seeing two more works by Hall in the same series, with the same robots. One showed military officials watching a launch of a flying robot. The other showed white-coated scientists performing maintenance work on one or two of the giant humanoids while an officer looks out unemotionally over a balcony at a room the size of an aircraft hangar that is packed with standing robots. Even as the details of the work get fuzzy in my mind (which I sometimes suspect doesn't deal with pictures so much as it deals with verbal descriptions of pictures that it then uses to try to reconstruct the originals later), the sense of space stays with me, and the feeling that this massive chamber full of these gigantic mechanical marvels was somehow mundane to their uniformed masters.
Today, it occurred to me to search online for the artist, and I may have found him. Charles Danny Hall, born 1910, was a designer working in Hollywood. He worked for Chaplin and many others. He did watercolors for many years. In one painting, the signature resembles that on the two paintings in the book I have, as far as I'm able to tell. Then again, another painting (from Ebay), offers a magnified view of a somewhat different looking signature.
So I don't know if I've solved a mystery or just made it worse. If I'd only had a digital camera back in those days, I'd have taken pictures of quite a few of those paintings.
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Page 55 of the book Thrift Store Paintings shows two pulp-like paintings involving large robots. A robot bursts out of a packing box. A robot menaces two young women. They were interesting, but it was only when Cathy persuaded me to go see an art exhibition at Old Dominion University that I really appreciated the artist, Danny Hall.
The gallery, which occupied a former storefront on Granby Street in Norfolk, VA, consisted of just about all the paintings in the book, and more. I was pleased to see more canvases by Roehl, whose off-kilter images might have influenced me afterwards. The real revelation was seeing two more works by Hall in the same series, with the same robots. One showed military officials watching a launch of a flying robot. The other showed white-coated scientists performing maintenance work on one or two of the giant humanoids while an officer looks out unemotionally over a balcony at a room the size of an aircraft hangar that is packed with standing robots. Even as the details of the work get fuzzy in my mind (which I sometimes suspect doesn't deal with pictures so much as it deals with verbal descriptions of pictures that it then uses to try to reconstruct the originals later), the sense of space stays with me, and the feeling that this massive chamber full of these gigantic mechanical marvels was somehow mundane to their uniformed masters.
Today, it occurred to me to search online for the artist, and I may have found him. Charles Danny Hall, born 1910, was a designer working in Hollywood. He worked for Chaplin and many others. He did watercolors for many years. In one painting, the signature resembles that on the two paintings in the book I have, as far as I'm able to tell. Then again, another painting (from Ebay), offers a magnified view of a somewhat different looking signature.
So I don't know if I've solved a mystery or just made it worse. If I'd only had a digital camera back in those days, I'd have taken pictures of quite a few of those paintings.
.