I'm excited!
That huge - and ever growing - fantasy world in Minecraft that I've been helping build for years now is finally open for download!
Available on AstrophagyMC's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/astrophagymc
Apologies for not posting recently - there's been sickness in my house and little energy for writing. But today I saw this in the Washington Post and had to share!
In a list of the best small art museums in America, inevitably Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum was mentioned:
In Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” when one character calls for a toast, another objects: “This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that.” I feel the same about the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Its main building, designed by Louis Kahn, is the most beautiful museum building in America. The light, the proportions, the sense of space — there’s nothing quite like it. The collection is exquisite. Every work rewards close attention. The experience of spending a couple of hours there is very, very intense. Emotions inevitably arise — good luck keeping them at bay! — Sebastian Smee
It's been a very busy spring and summer - and I did not keep up with it at all in blogging! - so here's a grab bag of what-I-did-this-summer-ness:
And Wow! did I not blog a lot!
1) Let's start with listing the shows I worked on after Murrow: Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper for Echo Theatre at Dallas' Bath House Cultural Center, Herbitts, Wizards, and Borks! Oh My! at Pocket Sandwich Theatre, the musical Matilda for KWC, and Sherlock Holmes and the Elusive Ear at Stage West Theatre. I also acted as a mentor for their Design Apprenticeship Program, which involved three student designed in-house shows. So... lots.
2) Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper -
3) Sherlock Holmes and the Elusive Ear -
What a terrific assignment, to design Sherlock Holmes' legendary 221B Baker Street apartment! The script described red wallpaper... my version of his apartment played up red to the hilt.
One important note: this set will reappear for the next two years for sequels to the entertaining play so the design had to work for being struck and stored. One consequence is that, in the red wallpaper, a darker vertical stripe was added to help downplay vertical joints between flats, which we couldn't tape over or float out with drywall mud.
3) Matilda -
A big fun musical! With a big fun mostly-kid cast!
This is the only photo I have, mostly because I had to miss the final-final set dressing and the performances... because some one of those big fun mostly-kid cast (or crew or designers or...) shared their covid with me!
(A "light" case thank goodness, of the did I-swallow-broken-glass? variation of covid.)
Here are a few paint elevations:
Phew! I'll talk about Herbitts in the next post.
A fun new You Tube video from my buddy AstrophagyMC HERE
While coviding here at home for the last couple weeks (yeesh) I've been playing a lot of Minecraft. This vid doesn't show much of my work, but it does show the fun of the world our team has been working on, most lately on a city named Ptolith. And this particular build in the vid is the city's crown, the Time Temple. (The Biiiig circle at bottom left on this map.)
I've been... busy?
But I break my radio silence to share this very good video on Environmental Design. A phrase developed in game and theme park design, but very much what good theater set design and film production design also do. Enjoy! (And more posts more often coming soon.)
Trope Talk: Environmental Design
In aid of getting out the word about my new second edition of Alice Through the Proscenium I ended up just, y'know, ego-surfing... to see what pops on the internet when I type in my name or catchy phrases like "Clare DeVries theater book" and like that.
As one does.
In that surfing I found (like notes in a bottle) photos I'd never seen of a show I designed last spring for Tarrant College SE, The Volume of Smoke:
