The Virtual Art Gallery with 300 Russian and Western paintings from Levitan to Bruegel to Van Gogh by way of Vermeer.

The process of painting a scene or object which no one has seen first-hand is a process that reaches far into the past. Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) did one of the first Renaissance illustrations of a rhinoceros, and at the time the creature had not been seen by anyone in northern Germany. The naturalist Valentin Ferdinand saw one at the Royal Zoo in Lisbon. He sent a description and rough sketch to Durer, who made detailed ink drawings and wood cuts based on the scant information. Explorers throughout the ages have brought artists along to document discoveries and foreign vistas. The paintings of Bierstadt and Moran helped to convince the U.S. Congress to found the first two national parks at Yellowstone and Yosemite. Frederick Catherwood documented the discoveries of Maya, Aztec and Incan ruins by John Lloyd Stevens. Frederick Church mounted expeditions to Antarctica, South America and other environs to create some of the most beautiful natural science paintings in history.

Today we have new kinds of explorers, venturing into a new, vast frontier studded with burning stars, spinning worlds and swirling galaxies. Some of these explorers wear space suits, while others wear solar cells and foil. They all return tales from their travels, and it is the artist who must translate these tales into something on a human—and aesthetic—scale. The farthest humans have ventured is to the Moon, but astronomical art calls for artistic voyages to the frigid moons of Jupiter or even the desolate landscapes of planets circling other stars. The challenge presents some horrific travel expenses! Instead, the space artist must study the geology of the Earth and other worlds, finding terrain on terra firma that bears similarity to the geology of Mars, Venus, or a host of other targets.

We have recently seen the moons of Jupiter from less that 200 km distance, through the eyes of the Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. Twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity continue to explore the sands of the red planet Mars, revealing vistas of alien deserts, mountains and craters. The Cassini spacecraft, along with Europe's Huygens probe, has unveiled the strange moons, clouds and rings of Saturn in a multi-year mission. Other craft will soon visit Mercury and Pluto. The problem is that most data from spacecraft is not visual, but rather numerical. Streams of numbers come to scientists, who then must turn these numbers into something the rest of us can understand. That’s where the artist comes in, translating numbers into landscapes on a human scale.

Early Days

Space artists did not always have it so good. In the early 20th century, most data from the skies was gathered through telescopes. There were no closeup images of lunar boulders or Venusian summits. The grandfather of modern space art was, in fact, an astronomer. Lucien Rudaux was a careful observer, using the telescope of the Meudon Observatory outside of Paris, France. His oil paintings of Mars viewed from its moons, of Saturn and Jupiter, and of Martian dust storms still hold up remarkably today. (A view of Mars seen from its outer moon Deimos, by Lucien Rudaux, ca. 1930s)

In the 1950s, Chesley Bonestell popularized space art by doing a series of paintings illustrating articles by Willey Ley and Werner von Braun. His art depicts people exploring Mars seven years before the first artificial satellite was orbited. As science matured and we learned more about the planets, so space art matured, becoming more accurate and, in some ways, more sophisticated as a pure art form.

As probes and people continue to explore the cosmos, the artist continues to have opportunity to not only portray new discoveries, but to anticipate them. Ron Miller painted dust devils on Mars (Right) decades before they were confirmed. In 1997, the Pathfinder lander caught several dust devils on its imager, and actually charted them moving over the craft with its meteorology instruments (See above left). A few years later, the Mars Global Surveyor discovered trails left in the Martian sand by massive dust devils, confirming what Miller had predicted with the paint brush decades earlier.

Space artists are also venturing into the realm of digital art. Some use programs such as Terragen to generate fractal landscapes, often overpainting with software like Photoshop or Illustrator. In this “tradigital” painting, I have combined a foundation of acrylic or oil painting done traditionally with digital techniques. The scene depicts two geysers on Neptune's moon Triton. (Click on the picture below)

The traditions of space art parallel other genres and movements in the history of landscape art. While space subjects are more difficult to paint first-hand than are other natural subjects, artists continue to immerse themselves in the natural wonders of this world, creating views of other planets that await future generations of artists who will actually paint there.

For more on astronomical art, visit the International Association of Astronomical Artists.