Space Artists Work

The Cosmos contains many sources of visual inspiration that our growing abilities to gather and propagate has spread through the mass culture. The first photographs of the entire Earth by satellites and manned Apollo missions brought a new sense of our world as an island in empty space and promoted ideas of the essential unity of Humanity. Photographs taken by explorers on the Moon shared the experience of being on another world. The famous 'Pillars Of Creation' Hubble Space Telescope and other Hubble photos often evoke intense responses from viewers, see for example Hubble's Planetary Nebula. Perhaps such images provide modern audiences with fresh visions through which the religious awe invoked by the great murals in cathedrals of earlier centuries can be experienced anew.
Practitioners of the visual arts have for many decades explored space in their imaginations using traditional painting media and many are now using digital media toward similar ends. Science Fiction magazines and picture essay magazines were once a major outlet for space art, often featuring planets, space ships and dramatic alien landscapes. Chesley Bonestell, R. A. Smith, Lucien Rudaux, and Ludek Pesek were some of the major artists actively involved in visualizing space exploration proposals with input from experts in the infant rocketry field anxious to spread their ideas to a wider audience. A strength of particularly Bonestell's work was the portrayal of exotic worlds with their own alien beauty, often giving a sense of destination as much as of the technological means of getting there.