OPENING SALVO // Moonshots
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
Sometime this past spring, a little girl named Hayden, whom I had the pleasure of teaching in a children’s fencing class, asked her father, the artist Michael Grimaldi, what he used to draw when he was her age, around 11.
Rocket ships was the answer.
And why don’t you draw them anymore? she asked. The artist didn’t have a good answer, but it spurred him to take a moment away from the other figures he was sketching, scenes from Boccaccio’s Renaissance story collection The Decameron, and begin making images of two different spacecraft. Interestingly, both are marooned somewhere in the solar system.
Grimaldi’s nostalgic ships are rendered in the vernacular of 1950s sci-fi. They look truly sad if you find in them a metaphor for American exceptionalism. It’s as if our country’s white whale has finally heaved itself on the rocky sands of some distant planet, a remarkable achievement at the time. Now, however, it’s old-fashioned and rusted—and yet forever fixed as progress in some minds.
This past pandemic year has brought us back to Earth about how fragile our systems of government, commerce, and communication are.
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