Art and Space

Space Mysteries by Vance Kirkland, courtesy of the Vance Kirkland Museum Denver, Colorado

I have always been interested in the many ways of depicting space objects — whether through photography, or music, or on canvas. I’m no artist, meaning that I can’t draw or paint very well, but I do know what I like to look at. And often, I can see connections between art and the cosmos. In college one year I studied art history for a summer and grew to appreciate the different ways that artists cast their subjects — on canvas, in stone, whatever direction their muse takes them.

‘Way back in the early 1980s, my husband and I were running a recording studio and getting our planetarium show business off the ground, and we happened to meet an artist named Vance Kirkland. At the time (and for more than a decade earlier) he had been exploring scenes of outer space using a method of painting that derived from pointillism — where the artist creates whole scenes by daubing small dots of paint in primary colors to build up a larger image. Mr. Kirkland was using varying sizes of wooden dowels to daub circles of paint onto huge canvases. Some of his paintings, with names like “Energy of Mysteries in Space” and “Energy of Explosions 24 Billion Years B.C.” were wall-sized (and larger) explorations of space themes in wild colors and vibrant energy. We still have hanging in our living room a poster he created to celebrate a fund-raising effort for the Denver Symphony Orchestra. And, somewhere in my library I have a series of art books illustrating the breathtaking space views that Kirkland created throughout his career.

The Cat's-Paw Nebula courtesy of the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey.

Vance Kirkland died in 1981, not long after we met with him and his curator, Mr. Hugh Grant. We found out later how well-known Kirkland was — his work hangs in the Denver Art Museum and a search on his name in Google turns up thousands of citations from museums and collectors around the world. Today the Vance Kirkland Museum stands in Denver as a tribute to his work and imagination.

The top image in today’s entry is a very small thumbnail of a Kirkland painting called “Space Mysteries” and as I looked at it, I realized that although it was painted in 1973, I’d recently seen a space image that looked somewhat similar to it. But where? Then I remembered. The 2-Micron All-Sky Survey — an infrared survey of the sky undertaken by a consortium of universities and observatories recently announced that its mission of archiving 5 million images of the entire sky at high resolution was complete. I’ve mined around in the 2MASS gallery over the past few months to illustrate the upcoming book Visions of the Cosmos and had run across the second image up there — the Cat’s-Paw Nebula.

NGC 6334

This area of space, also called NGC 6334, is a cloud of gas and dust that appears to be the birthplace of several massive stars. It lies more than 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The bright sources are very young and massive stars that are radiating light so energetic and intense that it is eating away at the clouds of gas and dust that make up the nursery in which they are born. In this 2MASS image, which shows an infrared view of the scene, the warm molecular clouds of gas and dust appear as purple-blue. The stars are almost like Vance Kirkland’s points of light, scattered to form a backdrop of light against which the diaphanous clouds of the nebula float like some ethereal ghost.

Take some time to browse the 2MASS gallery (link above). The scientists who created the images have given the objects some quite imaginative names, and the images are almost like works of art themselves. The link between the very human proclivity toward art and the majesty of the universe will set your mind spinning. To quote The Moody Blues, “It’s all around if you could but perceive.”