The video is a tour of my friend John Belt's studio at SUNY Oswego. After 43 years he's retiring from teaching Tech Education, and the video is a last look at the studio before dismantling. This is not a single sitting video. It's long and detailed and needs a few short sittings to see everything. There's a few objects in the video that I too have, and no doubt while I'm holed-up here, escaping the heat, I'm going to look through my shelves to see if I can find them.
The video got me reminiscing about the old posts from 2011 on the Museum-Gallery-Studio classification system of model railroads. Over the years the ideas discussed there morphed into something called The Trains Preserve in 2016, and then this year I got to thinking of other variations when it struck me that Bill Schopp was the amateur scientist - in the Scientific American sense - of model railroading and his layout was his studio/lab. That's the kind of thing I'd like to build: free-form, easy to change and try things, but with areas for setting up photos that can be changed around as ideas change. A sort of model-making / model-streetcar-system Exploratorium (or at least an Exploratorium as I remember seeing it at the Palace of Fine Arts in the '80s.)
No comments:
Post a Comment