Space Artists Face Reality: NASA Does It Better
By Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer
June 18, 2006
From a cramped garage in Long Beach, astronomical artist Don Dixon has conjured the cosmos — geysers of liquid methane on Titan, Martian moonrises, a supernova in deep space.
He's taken people to places they could barely imagine through his illustrations, which have appeared over two decades in Scientific American, Omni and other magazines.
Then came the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars rovers and other high-powered robotic explorers that have poured out ever more amazing images.
Even space artists, who have spent their careers imagining the universe, reel at the photos of boulders on Saturn's moon Titan or star clusters 270 million light-years from Earth.
Reality, Dixon said with a sigh, has gotten too awesome. "NASA has overtaken us."
Just as the development of photographic cameras in the 19th century set fine artists on the road to abstraction, new astronomical technologies are shaking the world of space art, spurring space artists to seek out new subjects and experiment with new styles.
For decades, the field was dominated by the "rock and ball" school, named after the traditional space-art approach of meticulously drawing every detail science can glean about a place — the shape of craters, the angle of light, the hue of the sky, the position of stars.
Now a new school is rising, synthesizing the awesomeness of space with modern art genres. Some have dubbed the school "cosmic expressionism" or simply the "swirly" school, after the swirling sky in Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night."
Combined with the usual blackness of space and alien landscapes are images of soaring eagles, free-floating fetuses, surreal Dali-esque scenery, drip art and other embellishments on the awesome majesty of the universe.
It's a freewheeling mix of genres just barely held together by the fact that they're all set somewhere on the final frontier.
While the rock-and-ballers are still secure in their position as the preeminent interpreters of the cosmos, they are beginning to worry that their trade can't go on as it always has.
Dixon remembers the moment he saw the famed Hubble photograph of the Eagle Nebula's pillars of gas and dust.
It blew his mind.
"Images created from the Hubble data are what some of us jokingly call bad space art," Dixon said. "They are so fantastically weird, like the Eagle Nebula. Before Hubble took that picture, no astronomical artist worth his salt would have painted anything like that."
