| My
artistic interests are wide and varied but costuming seems
to be a primary passion. I can rarely watch a film or play
a videogame without finding new inspirations. I want to make
them exist in the real world, and time is really my only limitation.
I have an absolute passion for solving technical artistic
problems, and there are always new technical challenges in
sculpture and costuming. I am big fan of the expanded Star
Wars universe, especially KotOR and TFU, as well as many other
sci-fi and fantasy games/films.
I am primarily self-taught as an artist but with some formal
art education including a Bachelor's in Fine Art with a specialization
in sculpture (UCF). I also have a Bachelor's in Physics (USF)
and have taken many grad school courses in both subjects.
I taught physics classes at UCF and USF and currently work
as a graphic designer.
I am in my early 30's and have lived in Florida most of my
life. I have broad interests including art, music, science,
invention, and creative writing. I consider myself a student
of nature. My biggest heroes are Carl Sagan, Beethoven, Da
Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Galileo, Einstein,
Darwin, Democritus, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Mark
Twain. All creative, original, and free-thinking people are
an inspiration and a hero to me, especially those who challenge
the status quo and charge ahead.
Thank you for visiting my website and for taking an interest
in my artwork.
~Robert
Rodgers
Robert and Melanie 2009
We are having a baby boy, due late September, 2010!
The
influence of a vital person vitalizes [the world], there’s
no doubt about it. - Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth
Drawing I did for a book I am writing
The
secret of happiness is to find something bigger than yourself
and then to devote your life to it. - Daniel Dennett
Excerpt from a recent drawing of Melanie (note
the bird head behind hers)
Krishna’s
dictum: The best way to help mankind is through the perfection
of yourself.
Brother, Avery, Dane, and I
We
succeeded in taking that picture [of Earth from the distant
Voyager spacecraft], and, if you look at it, you see a dot.
That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever
heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their
lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands
of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines,
every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator
and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every
young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and
father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals,
every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader,
every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived
there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think
of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors
so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary
masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties
visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely
distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot.
How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to
kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings,
our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some
privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this
point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic
dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is
no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from
ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is
a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience.
To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the
folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny
world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more
kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve
and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
- Carl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot
You
will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously
supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however
different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to
another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present
opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing
it. - Thomas Paine
He
that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his
enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes
a precedent that will reach to himself. - Thomas Paine
It
is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry. -
Thomas Paine
My
country is the world, and my religion is to do good. -Thomas
Paine
The
Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them
is enemy territory, and they live in it like and army of occupation,
alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness.
- Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
"There's
nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to
enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live
in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that
puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will
live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which
they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords
of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world
is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe,
and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death
at their feet, as the world is now. - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
"You
can't say, 'We're going to change the way people behave toward
the world, but we're not going to change the way they think
about the world or the way they think about divine intentions
in the world or the way they think about the destiny of man.'
As long as the people of your culture are convinced that the
world belongs to them and that their divinely-appointed destiny
is to conquer and rule it, then they are of course going to
go on acting the way they've been acting for the past ten
thousand years. They're going to go on treating the world
as if it were a piece of human property and they're going
to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary. You can't
change these things with laws. You must change people's minds.
And you can't just root out a harmful complex of ideas and
leave a void behind; you have to give people something that
is as meaningful as what they've lost—something that
makes better sense than the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping
out everything on this planet that doesn't serve his needs
directly or indirectly." - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
I
do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions
of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest
inconvenience from it. - Mark Twain
As
a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings
happy death. - Leonardo da Vinci
The
one who tells the stories rules the world. - The Hopi
This
we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to
the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites
us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a
strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
... Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when
the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What
will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy
with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills
is blotted by talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone!
Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is it to say goodbye
to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the
beginning of survival. - Chief Seattle
I met Brian Muir at a 501st event. At age 23, he sculpted
the original Vader armor based on McQuarrie's concept and
still sculpts for major motion pictures. He just wrote a book
about his sculpture career and has a website: www.brianmuirvadersculptor.com
We
are having experiences all the time which may on occasion
render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your
bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to
be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth. All the
time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has
grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the
time- namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself
on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting
for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one
you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors
to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and
doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
- Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth |
