“We could look at ourselves as one artist rather than two individuals, and that third artist was doing something neither one of us would do. That lifted the work away from reflecting either one's personal viewpoint. We let it flow the way it flows when an artist is working by themselves and a color goes down that they didn't quite expect and that affects the next colors they use, and it seems to have a life of its own.”
- Diane Dillon
3rd Cosmonaut is the creative partnership between McKinley Baker and Katherine Jameson. Our current project is Mystic Prairie. We are multidisciplinary artists. We combine writing, acting, music, illustration and graphic design to create an immersive world for our audience.
We are also genre storytellers. It is frequently hard and unfulfilling for people to talk about their lives. Sir Walter Scott said that romanticism allows us to wear a "mask of veracity.” It lets us perform the story we want to tell about ourselves before we inevitably move past it to a stronger place. Genre fiction is defined by this romanticism. It manifests as an elliptical orbiting around truth - towards, then away from, then towards again. We're far enough distant that we can escape its gravity and get a good look without being destroyed completely. This orbiting eventually becomes an act of interpretation, of the story, and of our lives. It shapes the grim stuff of reality into a more human truth.