Periodically, we encounter curiosity from an ever increasing public whose awareness of space, and the art created over the years to depict it, subsequently leads to discussion as to what exactly is Space Art. Don Davis, FIAAA and Lucien Rudaux Award recipient has submitted a perspective to Wikipedia which periodically gets altered by unidentified authors. To protect his words from tampering, and to confirm its authenticity, I submit his original version below.

Kara Szathmary, IAAA President
July 2007

The Definition of SPACE ART

Space Art is a general term for art emerging from knowledge and ideas associated with outer space, both as a source of inspiration and as a means for visualizing and promoting space travel.
Whatever the stylistic path, the artist is generally attempting to communicate ideas somehow related to space, often including appreciation of the infinite variety and vastness which surrounds us.

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. When the famous 'Pillars Of Creation' Hubble Space Telescope image was released people claimed to see the face of Jesus Christ within it. Other similarly evocative Hubble photos exist, especially of 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.

Small art objects were carried on Apollo missions such as gold emblems and a small Fallen Astronaut figurine left on the Moon during the Apollo 15 mission. Visual observations have been recorded in drawings and commentary by earlier Cosmonauts and Astronauts of difficult to photograph phenomena such as the airglow, orbital twilight colors, and outer details of the Solar corona. An able and observant artist can record aspects of the surroundings beyond the design limitations of any particular camera system.
If and when artists finally get to live and play in zero gravity conditions as part of a hoped for migration of Humanity beyond Earth artistic expressions unknowable today will emerge. Although such dreams await substantial opportunity, early efforts by artists to have art pieces placed in space have already been accomplished with both paintings and sculpture.
The first painting to be brought to Earth-orbit was a radiant study of the golden sunlight on a Soviet space station by Russian artist Andrei Sokolov, carried aboard the Soviet Mir space station in the mid 1980s. The first substantial sculpture brought into space was also carried aboard Mir, Arthur Woods' Cosmic Dancer.

Practitioners of the visual arts have for many decades explored space in their imaginations and on their easels.The vast majority of space art output has been pictorial representations of space subjects, realistically and otherwise, using painting and more recently digital media. Science Fiction magazines and picture essay magazines were a major outlet for space art, often featuring planets, space ships and dramatic alien landscapes.
Chesley Bonestell and R. A. Smith were 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 attempt to portray exotic worlds with their own alien beauty, often giving us a sense of destination as much as of the technological means of getting there. Other forms of pictorial space art bring the viewer to inner visions inspired directly or otherwise by the fruits of the expanding vision of Humanity.

Some aspects of such art pay visual homage to outer space, popular ideas of life on other worlds including alien visitation visions, dream symbology, psychedelic imagery and other influences on contemporary visionary art.

Astronomical art, largely an outgrowth of the artistic standards of Bonestell, is an aspect of space art whose primary emphasis is in giving the viewer visual impressions of alien and exotic places in the Cosmos.
As an Astronomical artist, one should have a sense of why the lighting, sky color, even your chosen landscape surroundings appear as they do, and how a drastic change in a specific condition as on other worlds could alter the scene dramatically. One should have a reasonable 'grounding' in science, the nature of the sky and weather, and Geology for knowing the Earth as well as Astronomy for knowing the heavens. Such artists share with every other conceivable creative expression the vast arena containing what can be called Space Art.

IAAA INVADES KENNEDY SPACE CENTER

SCHEDULED SPEAKERS
Robert Millis, Lowell Observatory
Ted Bowell, Lowell Observatory
Dennis Di Cicco, Sky & Telescope
Paul Comba, Prescott Observatory
John Rogers, Camrillo Observatory
Roy Tucker, Goodricke-Pigott Observatory
Brian Marsden, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Richard Kowalski, Quail Hollow Observatory
Alan Harris, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Arne Henden, US Naval Observatory
Charles Wetterer and Slavko Majcen, US Air Force Academy
Walter Worman, Moorhead State University
Kenneth Zeigler, Destiny School, Globe, AZ
Brian Warner, Palmer Divide Observatory
Lawrence Garrett, A.L.P.O.
Brian Skiff, Lowell Observatory

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTED PAPERS
There is a call out for Contributed papers as well as Poster presentations. If you will be attending, please consider contributing to the workshop as well. The request for Contributed papers and Poster presentations can be read at: http://www.bitnik.com/mp/mpw99/contributed.htm

REGISTRATION
Registration for the workshop is now being accepted. The fee is $35 (U.S.) and will increase to $45 on March 15th. This fee will cover the reception to be held on Thursday evening, April 22, four coffee breaks during the workshop, a registration kit, and the proceedings of the workshop. The fee does not include two optional buffet style lunches at $10 each, or the optional Friday dinner at $25. Registration fees may be paid in the following manner. Personal and Cashiers Checks should be made payable to "Lowell Observatory" and mailed to:

Minor Planet Workshop
Lowell Observatory
1400 W. Mars Hill Rd.
Flagstaff, AZ 86001

Visa, Mastercard and American Express cards will also be accepted, but a hard copy of the amount, card number and signature *must* be mailed or FAXed to Lowell Observatory. A registration form can be found at the bottom of this announcement as well as at: http://www.bitnik.com/mp/mpw99/Register_form.html
Chris Vancil
Seattle, WA USA - Tuesday, February 23, 1999 at 16:47:40 (EST)

1998 and 1999 swedish member Bibbi Ahrnstedt, has and is exhibiting some of her space-inspired glassworks in this project Website: http://user.tninet.se/~stb444s

The next time you´re in Stockholm picking up that Nobel Prize you could check out the scale of 1:20 million, the SSS is centered at Stockholm´s Globe Arena, an 85-meter-high spherical building that represents the Sun and its corona. From there, the planets are arrayed along a mostly northerly line, with Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars falling within Stockholm city limits, and Pluto lying some 300 kilometers distant. Scaled models of the planets and accompanying exhibits are being installed at each site, says Gosta Gahm, an astronomy professor at Stockholms Observatory who, with plasma physicist Nils Brenning of the Royal Institute of Technology, has led the project. In May 1998, a 62 cm diameter model of Venus was unveiled during the 250th anniversary celebration of Stockholm´s Old Observatory. The remaining planets will be completed over the coming year or so. "At this scale, one gets the direct feeling of how empty and desolate space is, how small and far away the planets are," notes Gahm.
Bibbi Ahrnstedt
Stockholm, Sweden - Sunday, February 21, 1999 at 13:40:46 (EST)

Jelly's Comet

The title Jelly's Comet relates to the importance that comets have played in the study of the heavens by ground-based telescopes. These distant balls of rock and ice are regular visitors in skies, coming even closer to us through the eyes of a telescope. Observatories also play a role in the discovery of comets, such as Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which was found through the 0.4-meter Schmidt telescope on Palomar Mountain.

The great observatories of the world have been instrumental in furthering our understanding of a myriad of cosmic wonders, such as stars, galaxies, and nebulae. Peering deeply into the blackness of space toward tiny points of light, several planets have been discovered outside our own solar system, many of them orbiting sun-like stars.

Do any of these planets or others as yet undiscovered have life? We don't know. But if they do, it is possible that life forms called "floaters" may exist on some of them. Similar in appearance and structure to the jellyfish, they ride on currents of air rather than currents of water.

It is unlikely that ground-based telescopes will ever be able to resolve distant life forms as they are too far away and too small. However, if such floaters are ever found, someday in the future, it will have been the decades of astronomical discoveries and advances made at the large observatories that paved the way for these life forms to be found. It is the legacy of Palomar—and other similar research facilities—that makes future knowledge and understanding about the universe possible.
Lynette Cook
- Saturday, August 01, 1998 at 10:54:24 (EDT)

I am in the process of organizing a space art event like none ever seen. The exhibition will be in the spring/summer of 1998 (May through June or July) at the University of Florida's Museum of Natural History.

Right now I am asking people who are possibly, maybe, interested in participating to let me know. I am not asking for firm commitments at this point. The exhibition will involve more than displaying the art. I am looking to illustrate the science-art connection by having both scientists and artists participate. I would love to have artists make presentations about their work, and I am open to all ideas.I alo want to have a tie-in with the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. If you are interested, let me know

Dirk Terrell
4302 NW 25th Ter.
Gainesville, FL 32605

Looking forward to hearing from every one of you!

Thanks
Dirk Terrell
Gainesville, FL USA - Saturday, April 11, 1998 at 14:06:07 (EDT)

Thanks,
David A Hardy (President, IAAA)
Birmingham, WM England - Monday, April 06, 1998 at 03:56:43 (EDT)