RADEBAUGH - Mid Century Futurism Print - Insectothopter - Futurist Imagineer Arthur Radebaugh - Bat Winged Space Age Suburban Ornithopter

Treasures from THE RADEBAUGH COLLECTION at Lost Highways Archive & Research Library. By exclusive arrangement with The Grand Review.

Print size 18 x 24, and consciously formatted to work with a standard size store bought frame, or custom framed as you see fit.


Ornithopter! Insectothopter!


***NOTE*** The ornithoptor here may be fanciful, but designing and building working ornithopters is very much alive. Here is a great link to The Ornithopter Zone...

http://www.ornithopter.org/



Radebaugh Resurrection Part 2

Next step, while running a business and trying to stay ahead of bills while being a good daddy and decent husband, etc, was to dive into research so intense yet funny it felt like of a spoof of modern detective TV shows. Fortunately for us, Jared Rosenbaum, a New York punk rock lad who had a freshly minted sociology degree found Lost Highways Archive through the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, and showed up at damned near the same moment that all things Radebaugh exploded across all our work tables and clipped up to our walls.

We knew already that this work deserved a show of its own, so we dove into following clues about this mysterious illustrator to try to patch together who he was. This included, yes kids it really used to be all about this, repeated trips to the library, mountains of notes on legal length pads and clip boards, and stacks of 5 cent xeroxes.

Every lead was pounced on. Every name was tracked down. We created a very expensive website for the new internet and directed people who had computers to look there and tell us what we were doing right, and where we had it wrong. People who had known Arthur Radebaugh appeared either through direct contact from us or from old friends contacting old friends once the news hit about what we were up to.

During all this we started to lay out an exhibition in the huge old loft space we had in the Old City section of Philadelphia, across from Ben Franklin's house and post office. This was still the era when you could clean out and rent these spaces if you had the nerve to go spelunking in old buildings, and the rent was comically cheap.

Central to the show were huge digital restorations of the lost portfolio images printed on the first generation of the amazing Epson large format on demand printers, though we were able to fill stackable antique showcases we'd salvaged with a broad range of smaller Radebaugh memorabilia, original magazines and ads and blotters and pennants and you name it, that he had been associated with, as well as enormous reproductions of the space age airbrush work he'd done for brochures for the auto industry.

End Part 2..........................

• Handmade item
• Materials: Art stock enhanced matte paper, archival ink
• Made to order
• Only ships within United States.

SHIPPING

All prints are shipped in a sturdy mailing tube for $8, which covers postage, tube and S & H.

BUYING MORE THAN ONE PRINT? Add a second print or any number thereafter of this or any other prints in our catalog and shipping is still just $8, total!!!

International shipping is available and reasonable. Please contact us for details.

A NOTE ON OUR PROCESS, OUR CHOICES AND THE QUALITY OF THE GRAPHIC CRAFTSMANSHIP THAT GOES INTO OUR PRINTS.

Every print we deem exciting enough to present to the public via our Etsy store or available here at our studio has gone through a number of steps. The first of those is always discovering and falling in love with an obscure image, always an original that we can hold in our hands. That image is speaking to us, sometime screaming “Don’t leave me here. See what I am, what I was, what I can be, what I SHOULD be!”

There is a real sense of excitement involved, and a great many smiles and knowing grins when we make that deal and bring that ancient print, that battered photo, that scrap of ephemera that contains some scrap of genius from an unknown commercial artist home with us, knowing already how we mean to approach its restoration.

There is the heady promise of a further hunt just as real as what drags a weekend fisherman out of bed at 3AM to work a favorite brook as we start our research, looking for that great backstory, and both ready and willing to tumble down as many rabbit holes as are revealed to us to get that story.

Then there is a meticulous digital restoration that is as often as much fun as riding a vintage Moto Guzzi on a winding coastal road. I don’t care if that sounds crazy, it really is like jumping in the saddle! So many choices, so many chances to take to subtly or spectacularly give new life to otherwise permanently obscure images.

This dedication and the ongoing rush of joy in the accomplishment of it, and the opportunity to share the results in our studio and here on Etsy, is the fire of passion that keeps these engines roaring. We make every effort to ensure our customers are not just satisfied but thrilled, and we happily stand 100% behind our work.