The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula

"Space art", also known as "astronomical art", is a genre of art that focuses on the universe as a frame of reference. Like other genres, space art has many facets and encompasses realism, impressionism, hardware art, sculpture, abstract imagery, and zoological art. Though artists long have produced art with astronomical elements, the genre of space art itself began only when technological advancement allowed for more detailed observation of the night sky. Space art also attempts to communicate ideas related to space, often including an artistic interpretation of cosmological phenomena and scientific discoveries. In some cases, artists who consider themselves space artists use more than illustration and painting to communicate astronomy or works depicting space, with some working directly with spaceflight technology and scientists in attempts to expand the arts, humanities, and cultural expression relative to space exploration.

For many decades, visual artists have explored the topic of space using traditional painting media, followed recently by the usage of digital media for the same purpose. Science-fiction magazines and picture-essay magazines were one of the first major outlets for space art, often featuring planets, spaceships, and dramatic alien landscapes. Chesley Bonestell, R. A. Smith, Lucien Rudaux, David A. Hardy, and Ludek Pesek were some of the prominent artists in the early days of the genre, actively involved in visualizing topics such as space exploration. Astronomers and experts in rocketry played roles in inspiring and informing artists in this genre.

NASA's second administrator, James E. Webb, created the space agency's Space Art program in 1962, four years after its founding.^[1] Bonestell's work in this program often depicted various celestial bodies and landscapes, highlighting both the destinations and the imagined technologies used to reach there.

Astronomical art

Astronomical art is an aspect of space art devoted to visualizing outer space. A major emphasis on astronomical art is the space environment as a new frontier for humanity. Many other works portray alien worlds, extremes of matter such as black holes, and concepts inspired by astronomy.

Astronomical art was largely pioneered in the 1940s and 1950s by Chesley Bonestell. He is often credited for his ability to solve perspective problems, paint with the eye of a matte artist to create a visual impression, and seek out the experts in the fields that fascinated him. His work helped inspire many in the post-war era to think about space travel, which seemed fantastical before the V-2 rocket. To this day, artists assist in turning ideas into visible forms in the space community, both in portraying the latest ideas on how to leave Earth and in showing what may exist in space.

Astronomical art is the most recent of several art movements that have explored ideas emerging from ongoing exploration of Earth. Finding its roots in genre's such as Hudson River School or Luminism, most astronomical artists use traditional painting methods or digital equivalents in a way that brings the viewer to the frontiers of human knowledge gathered in the exploration of space. Such works usually portray things in the familiar visual language of realism extrapolated to exotic environments, whose details reflect ongoing knowledge and educated guesswork. An example of the process of creating astronomical art would be studying and visiting desert environments to experience something of what it might be like on Mars and painting based on such experiences. Another would be to hear of something likely to be amazing to watch up close, then seek out published articles or experts in the field. Usually, there is an artistic effort to emphasize the favorable visual elements, just as a photographer composes a picture. Notable astronomical art often reflects the artist's interpretation and imagination regarding the subject portrayed.

Science fiction magazines such as Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, Astounding (later renamed Analog), and Galaxy served as major outlets for the work of space and particularly astronomical artists in the 1950s. The several picture essay magazines of the time, such as Life, Collier's, and Coronet, were other major outlets for such art. Today, astronomical art can be seen in magazines such as Sky and Telescope, The Planetary Report, and occasionally in Scientific American. The NASA fine arts program has been an ongoing effort to hire artists to create works generally specific to a particular space project. The program documents historical events in recognizable form for professional artists. The NASA Fine Arts Program operated in an era of forward progress under its first head director, James Dean. Even then, pictorial realism seemed a subset rather than a dominating visual influence.

The works that document space flight situations, such as those referenced above, are similar in concept to government efforts during World War II to send artists to battle zones to document things as they saw them, much of which appeared in contemporary Life magazines.

Another close parallel to astronomical art is dinosaur art. Both art schools explore unreachable realms with the intent of bringing a sense of reality to them. The 'Grand Masters' of that field, such as Charles R. Knight and Zdeněk Burian, worked with experts in the field, using the best available information to create a realistic vision of something we can never behold with our own eyes. Ideally, as with astronomical art, such a work tries to show what is known about the subject, with some educated guesswork to fill in the unknown and unknowable. We see more recent works by a healthy number of great dinosaur artists that reflect the growth in knowledge in body stances, likely feathers, etc., just as we see alien landscapes now painted that reveal the gathered knowledge instead of the craggy fantasies and the 'blue sky' Mars of yesteryear. Most of today's widely published space and astronomical artists have belonged to the International Association of Astronomical Artists since 1983.

Historic influences

Photography

The Blue Marble, Earth as seen from Apollo 17, 1972

The first photographs of the entire Earth by satellites^[5] and crewed Apollo missions^[6] brought a new sense of our world as an island in empty space and promoted ideas of the essential unity of Humanity.^[7] Photographs taken by explorers on the Moon shared the experience of being on another world. The famous Pillars of Creation^[8] Hubble Space Telescope and other Hubble photos often evoke intense responses from viewers, for example Hubble's planetary nebula images.^[9]

Artistry

Space artists may work closely with space scientists and engineers to help them visualize and develop their scientific and technological concepts of space exploration. Other forms of pictorial space art bring the viewer to inner visions inspired, directly or otherwise, by the fruits of the expanding vision of humanity. Some aspects of such art pay visual homage to outer space and popular ideas of life on other worlds, including alien visitation visions, dream symbology, psychedelic imagery, and other influences on contemporary visionary art.

Artists have experienced free-fall conditions during flights flown with NASA, the Russian and French Space Agencies, and the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium. Early efforts by artists to have art pieces placed in space have already been accomplished with painting, holography, micro-gravity mobiles, floating literary works, and sculpture.^[10]

Art in space

Golden olive branch left on the Moon by Neil Armstrong (Apollo 11) as a symbol of peace.

Zero-g space art

Another work, later brought to Earth orbit sometime in the mid-80s, was a study of the golden sunlight on a Soviet space station by Russian artist Andrei Sokolov, carried aboard the Soviet Mir space station starting with modules in February 1986. In 1984, Joseph McShane and Lowry Burgess had their conceptual artwork flown aboard the Space Shuttle utilizing NASA's 'Get Away Special' program.^[13] The first sculpture specifically designed for a human habitat in orbit was Arthur Woods' Cosmic Dancer^[14][15] which was sent to the Mir station in 1993. In 1995, Arthur Woods organized Ars ad Astra, the first art exhibition in Earth orbit.^[16] consisting of 20 original artworks from 20 artists and an electronic archive also took place on the Mir space station as a part of ESA's EUROMIR'95 mission. In 1998, Frank Pietronigro flew Research Project Number 33: Investigating the Creative Process in a Micro-gravity Environment, where the artist drew, created 'drift paintings' and danced in micro-gravity space. In 2006, the artist returned to micro-gravity flight to create three new works, one in collaboration with Lowry Burgess, Moments in the Infinite Absolute, Flags in Space!, and a new form of micro-gravity mobile.

The Slovenian theater director Dragan Živadinov staged a performance called Noordung Zero Gravity Biomechanical during a parabolic flight organized through the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center facility in Star City in 1999. The UK arts group The Arts Catalyst, with the MIR consortium (Arts Catalyst, Projekt Atol, V2 Organisation, Leonardo-Olats), organized a series of parabolic 'zero gravity' flights for artistic and cultural experimentation with the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, as well as with the European Space Agency, between 2000 and 2004, including Investigations in Microgravity,^[17] MIR Flight 001,^[18] and MIR Campaign 2003.^{[19][20][21][22]}Artists who participated in these flights and visits to Russia and ESA have included the Otolith Group, shortlisted in 2011 for the Turner Prize, Stefan Gec, Ansuman Biswas and Jem Finer, Kitsou Dubois, Yuri Leiderman, and Marcel.li Antunez Roca.

The Mexican artist and musician Nahum directed the art and science project Matters of Gravity (La Gravedad de los Asuntos in Spanish), a project reflecting on gravity in its absence. The first mission consisting only of Latin American artists was executed in a zero-gravity flight at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in 2014. The participating artists include Tania Candiani, Ale de la Puente, Ivan Puig, Arcángelo Constantini, Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, Gilberto Esparza, Juan Jose Diaz Infante, Nahum, and Marcela Armas. The project included the participation of Mexican scientist Miguel Alcubierre and curators Rob La Frenais and Kerry Anne Doyle.

Fallen Astronaut, left on the Moon by David Scott during the Apollo 15 mission

Small art objects have been carried on several Apollo missions, such as gold emblems and a small Fallen Astronaut figurine that was left on the Moon during the 1971 Apollo 15 mission. Visual observations have been recorded in drawings and commentary by earlier cosmonauts and astronauts of difficult-to-photograph phenomena such as the airglow, twilight colors, and outer details of the solar corona. An able and observant artist can record aspects of their surroundings beyond the design limitations of any particular camera system.

Performance art has also occurred in space, as with Chris Hadfield's edited performance of David Bowie's 1969 song "Space Oddity."^[23]

Sojourner 2020 project onboard the International Space Station

In the Sojourner 2020 project from MIT, the Space Exploration Initiative took nine selected artists to develop art projects on board the International Space Station. Sojourner 2020 was a 1.5U size device (100mm x 100mm x 152.4mm) that was launched into low Earth orbit between March 7 and April 7 during the COVID-19 pandemic. It featured a three-layer telescoping structure that simulated three different "gravities": zero gravity, lunar gravity, and Martian gravity. Each layer of the structure rotated independently. The top layer remained still in weightlessness, while the middle and bottom layers spun at different speeds to produce centripetal accelerations that mimicked lunar gravity and Martian gravity, respectively. Each layer carried six pockets that held the projects. Each pocket was a container with a diameter of 10 mm and a depth of 12 mm. The artist proposed and accomplished artworks in a variety of different mediums, including carved stone sculptures by Erin Genia, liquid pigment experiments by Andrea Ling and Levi Cai, sculptures made of transgender hormone replacement medicines by Adriana Knouf, and living organisms, like marine diatoms of the genus Phaeodactylum Tricornutum, by Luis Guzmán.^[24]

The nine artist groups selected onboard Sojourner 2020 were:

Moon Gallery viewed from the ISS Cupola

· Luis Bernardo Guzmán - bio architectures (Cosmobiology) - Chile

· Xin Liu, Lucia Monge - Unearthing the Futures - China and Peru

· Levi Cai & Andrea Ling - Abiogenetic Triptych - USA, Canada

· Kat Kohl - Memory Chain: A Pas de Deux of Artifact - USA

· Henry Tan - Pearl of Lunar - Thai

· Janet Biggs - Finding Equilibrium - USA

· Masahito Ono - Nothing, Something, Everything - Japan

· Adriana Knouf - TX-1 - USA

· Erin Genia - Canupa Inyan: Falling Star Woman - American Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate^[25]

Space art organizations

See also

• List of space artists
• List of space art related books
• Time capsule

References

Further reading

• Space Art, Ron Miller, Starlog Magazine
• Visions of Space, David A. Hardy, Paper Tiger 1989
• Worlds Beyond: The Art of Chesley Bonestell, Ron Miller & Frederick C. Durant, III
• Star Struck: One Thousand Years of the art of Science and Astronomy, Ronald Brashear & Daniel Lewis, 2001 Univ. of Washington Press
• Futures: 50 Years in Space, David A. Hardy & Patrick Moore, AAPPL 2004
• Out of the Cradle: Exploring the Frontiers beyond Earth, William K. Hartmann, Ron Miller and Pamela Lee (Workman Publishing, 1984)
• Space Art: How to Draw and Paint Planets, Moons, and Landscapes of Alien Worlds, Michael Carroll, 2007 Watson Guptill/Random House
• The Impact of American and Russian Cosmism on the Representation of Space Exploration in 20th Century American and Soviet Space Art, Kornelia Boczkowska, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2016

External links

• International Association of Astronomical Artists
• numerous space art site links