This is Captain Ginger. As I was putting him together I started to paint the story in my mind ….a pudgy little kid with his bottom lip rolled up over the top. He’s running around the back yard with a piece of cloth that he found. He put some strings on it and it became a cape.
Now he’s jumping up over the picnic table and bench in the backyard. “Look at me mom! Look at me, I can fly” And as mom looks out from the kitchen window, she says “Sweetie, what a great cape! Of course you can fly!”
There are some aspects of him that make me think about the very end of Iron Giant when the giant is flying up and you hear Hogarth saying “You are who you choose to be”, then the giant says “Superman”.
Capt. Ginger was sold at the Boys and Girls Club Winter Craft Fair to a delightful older gentleman in his 90’s. He had been looking at him for 10-15 minutes; turning him over and studying all the parts/pieces. Then he turned to me, with the biggest smile on his face and said he’d like to take him home now. It totally made my day how happy this man was.
I can now picture that Capt. Ginger is sitting next to this man’s chair in his living room and each time he looks over there’s a lil’ sparkle in his eye thinking about when he was a little kid running through the yard with a cape. Man, I love what I do.
When I’m out and about meeting with people, a lot of times people will speak about my robots as if they are alive – “He’s cute”, “What’s her name?”…truth be told, sometimes I think that they’re alive myself! I do see them come together in the disjointed pieces on my bench and find myself telling little anecdotes about them as I’m putting them together. If you’ve seen some of my pieces recently, you know I have been starting to put together biographies for all of my Shopbots. I see the personalities in each of them.
