Category Archives: space art

astronomy, space art

Art of Space

2 Comments

Visions of the Cosmos from the Mind of an Artist

I’ve written about space art before, about how much I like the genre and how inspiring it is. Part of this is because I am smitten with gorgeous actual images of stars, planets and galaxies, and I love to see how artists depict them. I also like space art because it (like astronomy) takes us to places we’ll likely never visit on our own.  I went stooging around the Web today looking for good space art. Here are some lovely places and pieces I found — and I encourage you to visit the associated Web sites for more info.

The granddaddy of space artists was Chesley Bonestell. Over at Bonestell Space Art, you can follow his career through his art.  Check it out!

The Astronomer, by Ryan Bliss of Digital Blasphemy.com
The Astronomer, by Ryan Bliss of Digital Blasphemy.com

Another artist whose work I’ve been supporting with a modest yearly membership to his website is Ryan Bliss at Digital Blasphemy.  I’m continually amazed at his work and you’ll love it, too!

He releases new images pretty regularly, and makes them available in a variety of sizes for desktop use.

Ryan also links to a user gallery that features stunning views of the cosmos by artists such as Markus Gann (3dSceneries.com), as well as work from another space artist who goes by the name Kerem and his work adorns album covers (among other things.)

Jeff Quick is another artist whose work I enjoy. He displays his images and music under the name Moodflow. The site is gorgeous and a couple of his publicly available pieces show up on my desktop from time to time. He uses various programs to create his ‘scapes.

Alpha Orionis -- from Moodflow.com (Click to embiggen)
Alpha Orionis -- from Moodflow.com (Click to embiggen)

Jeff’s landscape of a planet at Alpha Orionis evokes a sort of quiet awe in the viewer at the same as it takes you to a place around a star that we see only from our vantage point around 500 light-years away. Whether or not there actually ARE such planets around that star is somewhat immaterial. The point is, the artwork TAKES you there! What you do after you get there is up to you and your imagination!

When I look at imagery like this it takes me back to the earliest days when I began to appreciate astronomy and the worlds beyond our planet. I used to imagine what it would be like to float among the rings of Saturn or take a ship to another planet around another star.

Cold Fire (a free download) by Inga Nielsen. (Click to embiggen.)
Cold Fire (a free download) by Inga Nielsen. (Click to embiggen.)

Inga Nielsen creates otherworldly views at her web page called Gate to Nowhere. Some are astronomy-oriented while others are more phantasmagorical.

I especially like her Cold Fire scene, with what appears to be an active star seen from the surface of a nearby frozen world. Maybe this is what the end of the Sun’s life will look like from the vantage point of a distant planet some 5 billion years from now.

For those folks who would like to emulate her work, Inga gives tutorials (albeit in German) on how to create the scenes she presents.

There are many, many good space artists showing their wares on the Web these days. Simply go to Google and type in the words “space art” and marvel at the scenes and worlds they take you to!

Happy art-gazing!

art, music, painting, space art

Can Astronomers be Artists?

2 Comments

…and can Artists be Astronomers?

I was reading again about Brian May, the lead guitarist of the rock band Queen and chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University. He started out in college doing work for a PhD in astrophysics, left it to join the band, and then in 2007 went back and finished his thesis and graduated in 2008 with the Fudd.

Now, I don’t see anything too unusual about this. Back in the day when I worked at a science lab at the university, a fair number of us geeks were also into artsy things. I myself play piano (not well), know how to sing, and play recorder. And, I write short stories, know how to embroider, and love to diddle with stuff in Photoshop. Another grad student at the lab was a ballet dancer (and she kept it up throughout all her years in grad school). Another was a guitarist and we also had a couple of drummers, a flautist or two, a saxophonist, and even a small recorder ensemble tucked away in various departments at the lab.

Astronomer and artist Robert Hurt (IPAC) created this scene of a young planet being born in a protoplanetary disk.
Astronomer and artist Robert Hurt (IPAC) created this scene of a young planet being born in a protoplanetary disk.

Lately I’ve run into astronomer-writers, astronomer-singers, astronomer-actors, and even an astronomer-belly dancer.

And, of course, there are the wonderful folks who are astronomers and space artists — putting their many and varied passions to work to show us how the universe looks.

In fact, I’ve found out over the years that scientists (and not just astronomers) are often quite accomplished at some aspect of art or design, too. Historically, some of the early astronomers composed music (Herschel), painted (18th-century amateur John Russell), and were quite creative and artsy types.

On campus, many of us spent time going to concerts at the music school and perusing exhibits at the art school. We didn’t always see art students and music school students coming to our Thursday afternoon colloquia to learn more about science, which I think is kind of sad. I think that science and art go hand in hand, like some great cosmic thread that ties together the creativity a scientist needs to explore the universe with the same impulse that  an artist needs to sculpt and sing and paint.