Those quizzes are fun aren't they? Gets the dust off the brain...
Here's a story about a guy I have to meet...http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/visualart/98450_arnold05.shtml
(good photo of him at the link)
Thursday, December 5, 2002
Johnny Jetpack's creator pursues bliss in some
off-the-wall directions
By KRISTIN DIZON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
For the past two months, Nathan Arnold has been obsessed with building a giant, "vicious,
man-eating" squirrel.
"I've always wanted to make this giant squirrel. Why has no one made a giant squirrel?" Arnold
wonders out loud. "They make gorillas and bears. Why not a squirrel?"
Few people live in a state of childlike wonder or
tap into their imaginative powers like Arnold, a
mason, oil painter, performance artist and the
head of "Johnny Jetpack Propulsion
Laboratories."
To study squirrels up close, Arnold, 43, baited
them with bread and peanuts. After sketching
their heads, he created a sand mold for a squirrel
skull 10 times bigger than life-size.
Now finished, the squirrel, with Arnold inside it,
is starring in a five-minute sketch at "Drunk
Puppet Nite," a mature-themed puppet show.
Arnold needs to create the way others need to
breathe, eat or sleep. His projects take more time
than a full-time job, but the money usually goes
out instead of coming in. His paintings don't
hang in the most fashionable galleries. He doesn't perform on hallowed stages.
But he'll never stop crafting his visions into reality.
"When I come up with an idea, I am so obsessed with how it's going to turn out and what's going
to happen," he says.
Johnny Jetpack
One of Arnold's creations that's gained a cultlike following is Johnny Jetpack. A 7-foot-tall puppet
that gets launched straight up in the air, Johnny Jetpack is "a family-friendly, homemade, low-tech
adult toy," according to Arnold.
It started out as Johnny Googoo, perhaps the world's only vomiting puppet. "He did a lot of
barfing. . . . People like that," Arnold says with a cheerful cackle.
In the early '90s, someone suggested that Johnny Googoo should fly. After a few hundred hours of
tinkering, Johnny Jetpack was born.
Johnny Jetpack's skeleton is made of wooden dowels tied together with
string, and his innards are clothespins, duct tape, surgical tubing and 11
two-liter plastic soda bottles that hold compressed air.
When released, the air forces out water in three more soda bottles,
creating about 100 pounds of thrust. If all goes well, Johnny Jetpack
flies as high as 120 feet in a few seconds. If not, he doesn't get off the
ground, or he spins around aimlessly or flies sideways.
Like many of Arnold's inventions, it's a marriage of art, physics,
chemistry, engineering and problem-solving.
Fully loaded, the Jetpack torso weighs 38 pounds. After being emptied
of water at launch, its 22 pounds touch down gently with the help of a
parachute. Johnny's rubbery head, made of painted latex over a wire
frame, pops off and lands where it may.
Arnold has launched Johnny Jetpack 40 times, mostly from Gas Works
Park. Friends tell friends when a flight is planned, and curious
passers-by add to the crowd. Johnny Jetpack became one local TV
station's picture of the year in 1994.
"When I can build something with my hands that entertains people and
uses scientific principles -- that's incredibly satisfying to me," Arnold
says.
He once thought of parlaying these launches into a living -- until
economic reality sank in.
The launch crowd is usually about 100 people, who contribute an
average of $1 each to a passed hat. That doesn't come close to minimum
wage for the time Arnold and his friends spend on the project.
"Oh my God! Nathan's crazy," says his friend Michelle Moore, a fellow
performer who collaborates with Arnold. "He'll work thousands of
hours on a project that lasts 10 minutes."
"For an audience of three," Arnold chimes in.
Viewers often want to touch the puppet or examine it closely. Some
bring flowers and perform mock funeral services for Mr. Jetpack. Small children tend to eye Arnold
as Johnny Jetpack's executioner and keep their distance.
Arnold could build a sleeker, higher-tech version of the puppet, but he thinks it would lose its
slap-dash charm.
"You look at it and it just looks like the work of a wonderfully demented person," he says. Asked if
he is such person, he smiles and says, "Sure."
Curious, mischievous
Born to a nuclear physicist and a homemaker, Arnold grew up in Los Alamos, N.M.
A frequent visitor to the principal's office as a child, he was considered disruptive and his grades
sagged, largely in the D-to-F range.
"I didn't like the idea of being told what to do. I didn't like the curtailment of freedom," says
Arnold, who describes himself as a curious, mischievous child who often was misunderstood.
He used to soak a tennis ball in gasoline and light it on fire before kicking it around like a soccer
ball. Or he would set leaves and pine needles ablaze in his Tonka toy truck and then send it crashing
into a tree.
The one class in which he excelled was art. His ability to draw, paint and sculpt came naturally. He
also tinkered obsessively on projects in his father's workshop.
In his senior year, Arnold accidentally burned down a building on the campus of his alternative high
school in Boulder, Colo., when he turned off a welding tool but didn't fully bleed it of gas.
Arnold knew college wasn't for him, so he went to welding school in Denver. Then he headed to
Seattle because he'd heard that shipyard welding jobs fell like apples from trees. Instead, he found
13 percent unemployment during the 1981 recession, and eventually a job as a dishwasher. He
never worked as a welder.
For many of the past 20 years, he has worked odd jobs, including dishwashing and prep cooking.
The longest he ever held a single job was four months.
Arnold went to brick laying school years ago. "It was one of the only times in my life I got an A,"
he says, without a trace of disappointment. He now makes most of his living repairing brick
chimneys and laying bluestone stairways and patios.
Learning the hard way
For a mind that likes to question the accepted order of things, Arnold's delicate oil paintings of local
landscapes are a surprise.
With titles like "Azalea Harmony" and "Towering Wisteria," Arnold's colorful, tightly framed
creations are painted from the Arboretum, the Ship Canal and other Seattle scenes.
The paintings reflect the seasons in an impressionistic way. Rich, muscular colors often contrast
with wispy brush strokes.
Some of his landscapes are more playful, with whimsical figures dotting the fields and ponds. In
one, an elf talks to a rabbit and penguins. In another, King David is a frog playing a xylophone. Yet
another features a fish out of water chatting with a blue crane.
Arnold has no formal training except for a painting class he took 25 years ago. "I learn the hard
way. And I usually make mistakes," he says.
Arnold has cataloged 460 works on Masonite and canvas since he started painting at age 15. For the
past dozen years or so, he has shown almost exclusively at the Stillwater Gallery.
"We took a look at his work and fell immediately in love with it," says Rick Kirsten, one of the
gallery's owners. "He's just the most typical starving artist that you would see. I loved the fact that
he never used to have a car. He went everywhere on his bicycle."
Packing a portable easel, Arnold still pedals to the scene of his choice and paints al fresco.
He sells an impressive two-thirds of his paintings, and three are owned by the Seattle Arts
Commission. But Kirsten says Arnold doesn't command high enough prices or paint enough to
make a living. Arnold's works start at about $180 and average around $500.
"Nathan checked his ego at the door a long time ago," says Kirsten. "He can walk in with his dirty
jeans on and talk to a CEO the same way he would talk to a homeless person. He's comfortable
with everybody."
Besides landscapes, Arnold paints dark, surreal
visions that often come from dreams. He had
such feverish nightmares as early as age 4 or 5.
"When the monsters would attack me in these
dreams, I'd draw them," he says.
Dreams and imagination are still inspiration for
Arnold, though the influence of surrealists such
as Dali and Bosch is clear.
One such work, "The Out of Control Monkey
Experiment," is a bleak, nightmarish vision of the
future that swirled in Arnold's head when he had
a fever.
In it, a man painted from Franklin D. Roosevelt's
likeness on the dime is bolted to a table with a
computer shoved into his face by a skeletal hand.
While strange insects rule the world, people are huddled masses looking for escape. And in the
foreground, two businessmen fight over a Christmas tree in a boxing ring.
"There's so much detail in his painting," said Brandon Wald, a fisherman who bought the scene for
$4,000. "I can stare at it for hours and hours and hours and I still see something I've never seen
before."
His most controversial painting is probably "Ferry Fire." Kirsten asked Arnold to paint something
for the Kirsten Gallery's annual maritime art show in the old Kingdome in 1993.
Arnold was inspired when he saw a fireboat and wondered what it looked like in action. So he
painted a car ferry on the Sound engulfed in flames and clouds of wretched black smoke. A fireboat
douses the ferry, while passengers jump off and a helicopter circles overhead.
"It was incredible. Nobody had ever painted anything like it," Kirsten says. "I have never had a
painting evoke that much emotion. And that's what art is about."
The painting is bold and striking, so much so that the chief naval architect of the state ferry system
wrote a blistering letter about the "inaccurate, alarmist" painting that wound up in Harper's
magazine.
"I absolutely loved the attention," Arnold says. "I just like someone taking art that seriously."The
largest collection of his work probably belongs to Lucy Kruse, who lives in West Seattle and
waitresses at a Capitol Hill pizza place. She owns nine of his pieces, buying most on layaway.
"The kind of art that Nathan does comes from your soul, not from any degree," says Kruse, who
favors Arnold's work with the fairytale animal figures. "You can't teach that to someone."
Kruse said she would love to see Arnold paint full-time, but she knows it won't happen.
"He's going to have to be setting something on fire or inventing something," she says. "I don't
think Nathan can just sit down and paint."
Basement tinkering
If his creations are any guide, Arnold's mind is like a Fellini circus.
Start with Laura, the fire-breathing monster. Actually, she's a radio-controlled car covered with
sheet metal. Her cousin is the "road rage rabbit," a car-driving metal hare that spits fire.
Both have gone with Arnold to the alternative Burning Man Festival in Black Rock, Nev., where
art, nudity, fire and a free-wheeling barter system are a way of life for a week.
Much of Arnold's tinkering is done in his basement, an accumulation of paint, lumber, fabric,
buckets, ladders, tools, puppet heads and a hanging unicycle.
Arnold's air witch, a puppet that dances wildly on an air vent, has fooled a few people who thought
she was real.
He is perhaps the only person with an "art cannon," a metal tube from which he has fired paint
clusters, clay people, glitter, spaghetti and more, onto paper. It was so powerful it blew the paper
apart.
"I should have used canvas," says Arnold. "I see potential."
Many of his ideas end in suspended development as his mind catches fire with the next project.
One such creation is a vortex generator. Warm air is pushed through a cylinder and spun by
sheet-metal blades, creating a delicate mini-tornado.
But he discovered that in an outdoor setting, a little wind blew his magical air cloud away. So the
machine sits, unused, in his living room.
Also shelved for the moment is Johnny Birdman, a white "ornithopter" with a 17-foot wingspan
that "flies" on a rope pulley.
Once the giant squirrel project is done, it's hard to guess what will come out of his brain and be
forged by his hands.
One project has camped in the back of his mind for a while. He wants to make a launchable wooden
bunny that breaks into fixable pieces when it crashes to the ground.
He calls it the Trojan rabbit.
ARNOLD'S ART
Want to see Arnold's work for yourself?
His giant squirrel skit at "Drunk Puppet Nite" will be offered Dec. 6 and 7 at 8 p.m. at Re-Bar,
114 Howell St. Tickets are $15 and advanced reservations are recommended; 206-323-0388.
Arnold will have an opening for a solo show of his paintings at the Stillwater Gallery, 1900 N.
Northlake Way, on Dec. 14. His work will show there indefinitely. 206-634-1900. |
