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To Boldly Paint What No Man Has Painted Before
David Mazzotta writes "It's not just Sci-Fi authors who have had influence on space technologies. Artist Chesley Bonestell produced beautiful space-art that inspiried people from Sagan to Heinlein."
It's amazing to see how artists can portray our universe. While writers and directors often get the most exposure to the public, the vast universe has inspired equally impressive works from visual artists and musicians.
...or paper copies atleast, I mean seriously, those are amazing!
- Here is a link to Chesley Bonestells web site where you can find more art.
- His Bio,
- And some more art is here.
- But this one has a bunch of scans.
- Other space artist links.
this stuff is so cool...pretzel_logic
did the fake backdrops for the staged Moon Landings?
If so, this guy is good! Bravo, take a bow !!
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
I have seen this artist before, I've run across him numerous times on the covers of sci-fi novels and in sci-fi and sci-fa magazines. I think his work is just beautiful. His inspiration? Space and progress, best as I can understand it.
Unfortunately, this sort of art wouldn't fly in the "serious" art world. Not only is it tied to "main-stream" books and publications on space, but also to the sub-culture of Science Fiction genre writing. Ironically enough, the college that I attend looks down upon any person who does Genre Fiction. But I digress too much.
Favorite Rant: The Art World today, is confused. It is full of artists, critics, curators and gallery managers who scrabble after the false god of "Art Has A Message". Sure it does. But is the artist required to draw a sodding road map?!? I know my professors will want me to do so for my senior show.
Like I said before. Love the work! It's beautiful, expansive (both physically and temporally), and (dare I say?!? [dare! dare!]) pure(?). Would that artists of his calibre were more accepted in both the main-stream as forward thinking and artists-for-everyone. And in the art world as the master-artists they are, if only the art world could drop the pretentious BS that they have swallowed with their chocolate-covered strawberries and red wine at every art opening.
Once more into the birch deer fiends!
this one [demon.co.uk] has a bunch of scans (pretzel_logic)
Wow, interesting, the image of astronauts burying their dead comrade on Mars. Pretty contoversial stuff, it must have caused a real storm when that picture got published. Anybody know anything about that picture? Give the man his due for realism. Can anybody imagine NASA producing a series of artistic impressions these days including a burial scene?
I suppose it follows in the great romantic tradition of the 'fallen hero' but respect to the man for telling the possible negative side of the story as well as the positive.
Am I the only one, when reading the topic of the story, thought of the intro scene of Red Dwarf with the astronaught (Lister?) painting the outside of the ship?
Yes, I think it's a word used in Nazi standard battlefield English. A dialect often found in hollywood war films, as in:
"Hande Hoch! For you Britisher, ze vor is over."
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Connection closed.
Oh...
...that the producers of Star Trek: TNG named a ship after the guy, the Oberth-class science vessel USS Bonestell.
;)
Clearly, the best of all possible tributes.
You may want to have a look at his own site too.
You want news for nerds? you want stuff that matters? You have GOT to subscribe to Invention and Technology. I've been reading it for about five years; it never fails to delight and intrigue me. Articles about fire alarms in the 1800s, or the connection between leaded gasoline and freon, or a 'train' of trucks large enough to stack jeeps on, or the airplane that carried parts of the space shuttle (giving the lie to the urban legend that the shuttle's SRBs are as wide as two horses' butts) or the invention of the first digital calculator or a description of the development of the controls for lithography on silicon chips or...I could go on and on. If you have any interest in technology and the history of technology, this is THE magazine to subscribe to.
Well, on most weekends, you can find this _amazing_ guy in downtown San Francisco, who paints sci-fi sceneries.
He uses a few innovative techniques to create awesome astronomical scenes using spray paint, in under just about 3-5 minutes. It's really great to watch, but the paintings are a little costly, about $25-$35.
The thing is, you can watch him paint it for you, and go on and buy it. If anybody's from in and around SFO, you can find him at Fisherman's Wharf, usually on Fri and Sat evenings. Neat stuff!
If you can find it, get a copy of The Conquest of Space, pictures by Bonestell and text by Willy Ley - published in 1950 by Viking press. Has data on the solar system and describes the planets as they were known about 50 years ago. The art is amazing - in addition to the planets (which are mindblowing), there are some paintings of the Earth (e.g. NY, the Great Lakes, Europe) as they would be observed from 25-500 miles above the surface during suborbital "rocket" transportation in the future.
BTW, one good place for used books is abebooks.
There's an artist who did the same for dinosaurs. He painted in the early-to-mid part of last century, and did a lot of museum murals and such. Everyone from fantasy movie effects people (Harryhausen) to modern museum curators to paleantologists have been influenced by his take on dinosaurs, "cave men", and other topics that he worked on.
The amazing thing is that he was nearly blind, and yet his paintings were more accurate than anyone had a right to be (we now know that some of his ideas were off, but suprisingly few, and much of his work remains in the territory of good guess, but we don't know).
As an amature/hobbyist space artist myself, I quite well remember my dad's copy of Conquest of Space. I would study it for hours.
One thing that used to puzzle me about Bonestell's works was that some parts appeared hand-painted, and other parts looked like photographs of actual rocks and mountains. IOW, there seemed to be an inconsistency from portion to portion of a given work.
I later found out that Bonestell used a combination of techniques. He used to build clay and wood models using his motion picture experience and materials, and photograph them to study and experiment with. These photographs often made it into parts of his space art.
I remember trying to duplicate the realism of some of his works as a teenager, never satisfied with the results. It seems I was trying to do the impossible: compete with photographs of clay models.
There is one Bonestell painting of the Great Wall (IIRC) on the moon. There is one cliff face there that is almost certainly a photograph in retrospect, and I would bust my butt trying to reproduce that same photo-realistic look in color pencils, pastels, and acrylics; but could not. When I found out about the photos, I screamed in my head "No F*cken Wonder!" (it was late and I didn't want to wake anybody).
BTW, some of my space art can be previewed at:
http://geocities.com/astroviews/
Table-ized A.I.
When I saw his snow-on-the-rocks in _Saturn as Seen From Titan_ in the story, I immediately throught "Bryce rendering". :-)
May we never see th