Date: December 13, 2010

Title: Art of Space

Podcaster: Carolyn Collins Petersen

Organization: Loch Ness Productions – http://www.lochnessproductions.com
Music from A Gentle Rain of Starlight, and Music from SpacePark360, by Geodesium – http://www.geodesium.com

Description: Carolyn Collins Petersen, TheSpacewriter, talks about space art and its relationship to astronomy and space exploration.

Bio: Carolyn Collins Petersen is a science writer and show producer, as well as vice-president of Loch Ness Productions, (http://www.lochnessproductions.com/index2.html) a company that creates astronomy documentaries and other materials. She and husband Mark C. Petersen, work often with some of the world’s best space artists for their shows. Carolyn works with planetariums, science centers, and observatories on products that explain astronomy and space science to the public. Her most recent projects include documentary scripts, exhibits for NASA/JPL, the Griffith Observatory and the California Academy of Sciences, video podcasts for MIT’s Haystack Observatory and podcasts for the Astronomical society of the Pacific’s “Astronomy Behind the Headlines” project.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Wayne Robertson, who encourages you to join him in supporting this great podcast.

Additional sponsorship for this episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” has also been provided by Wayne Robertson, who encourages you to join him in supporting this great podcast.

Transcript:

This is Carolyn Collins Petersen, TheSpacewriter.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to ski on the moon Ganymede? Or cruise across a lake on a distant planet and see the nearby stars of the Pleiades mirrored in the water’s surface? Or trudge across the sandy landscape of Mars toward the safety of your research dome? Or stand on the surface of a newly discovered exoplanet and look toward the star that it’s orbiting?

These scenes – and many more alien and distant landscapes — are the mainstays of the space artist.

Just as we have space music composers to create music — like what you hear behind my voice – there is also a distinguished group of print and digital artists who use astronomy and space exploration as their inspiration. From their fertile imaginations springs artwork that takes you on flights of science exploration.

Space art made a rather grand appearance in the mid-19th century. Jules Verne’s novel “From the Earth to the Moon” featured work by Emile Bayard and Alphonse de Neuvill as illustrations of his fantastic story. Other artists, like James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, soon took up the flag of space illustration, and it began appearing in books and encyclopedias. Science fiction novels and magazines have a long history of being great consumers of space-based art.

Space art got its biggest boost from the space age, of course. The launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite heralded more than the Space Race. It also inspired new generations of artists to ramp up our visual imaginations for exploration. Today there are space artists who work on animations of astronomy data – science visualizers who use stars, planets, and galaxies in their work. You often see their pieces on NASA’s web pages, mission web sites, in movies and television programs, and even on holiday cards and calendars. Look for space art on science fiction magazines, book covers, posters, space music album covers, and hanging on people’s walls as artwork to appreciate for its own sake.

Many of today’s space artists point to such grand masters as Chesley Bonestell as inspiration for their work. Bonestell really pioneered the modern space and astronomy art we see today. He’s so well-known and revered that he has a crater on Mars named after him, as well as an asteroid. If you’re a film buff, you might recall seeing his futuristic visions in movies such as Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, and War of the Worlds – all from the early 1950s, when modern space art was really starting to flower.

There’s also a whole colony of planetarium space artists who have created their work for use in such facilities as Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center in New York City, the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York, the Ward Beecher planetarium in Youngstown, Ohio, the Gates Planetarium in Denver, Colorado, the Samuel Oschin Planetarium at Griffith Observatory, the Morrison Planetarium at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences, and many, many others around the world.

A number of artists have jumped into the new digital realm of production, creating virtual tours of distant cosmic landscapes for state-of-the-art video productions.

One of my favorite space art websites is the International Association of Astronomical Artists. It features works by many of the world’s space artists, including Kim Poor, David Hardy, Joe Bergeron, Mark Garlick, Dan Durda, Lynnette Cook, Joe Tucciarone, Michael Carroll, Lynn Perkins, Julie Rodrigues Jones, Elizabeth Smith, Pat Rawlings, Rick Sternbach, Aldo Spadoni, and many, many others.

Space art shows the wonders of the universe – sometimes with humans as part of the visual story. Other scenes open up cosmic vistas that we can only hope to explore in our dreams. Artist Michael Whelan painted a lovely image called “Ultimate Sandbox” – a touching scene of a little girl in a space suit, sitting on the Moon’s surface, surrounded by her sand buckets and holding a little shovel – smiling at us, while a lovely Earth hangs in the background.

Another one, by Pat Rawlings, shows kids on Mars all dressed up in their spacesuits, building a snowman. Pat has another one showing a motorcyclist taking a bike ride across Mars.

Bob Eggleton, another veteran space artist, has a wonderful painting called “Snows of Jasper” that gives you a chilly feel for what it’s like to be on the surface of a planet in a multiple-star system. Kim Poor created a quirky vision of a saguaro cactus launching itself off the desert floor, back to its mysterious cosmic home.

To me, all the different approaches to space art bring the majesty of the universe home in an important way: they tell us that we are part of the universe, even as we are taking our first steps out to explore it.

If you’d like to learn more about space art, point your browser to www.thespacewriter.com/wp and click on the 365 Days of Astronomy tab to explore the worlds that space artists bring to us.

I’d like to specially thank space artist Dacio Rivera for inspiring me to create this podcast about astronomical art.

Thanks for listening and enjoy exploring the artistic cosmos!

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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