space and painting, two great tastes that, well, don’t tend to taste so great together. seems like most space related painting you come across is pretty crumby, not necissarily in terms of skill, but in general effect. either it’s heavily sentimentalized “realism” depicting astronauts mid space float or it’s heavily romanticized galactic landscapes depicting the shpere of one imagined celestial body piercing the horizon line of another imagined celestial body. in fact, to my mind, what turns out to be the most interesting space related painting is the pulpy cover art illustrating the imagined space of our science fiction. must it be this way?

there is a lot to be said about space art in general, but i will not say any of it here, i’ll just list a few thoughts at random:

-is it difficult to get across any higher emotional content in space art because so very few of us have actually seen space, or space vehicles, or the inner sanctums of nasa up close?

-what about the imagination factor? wouldn’t a place everyone knows exists, a place which surrounds our tiny island on all sides, but which so few have seen be the perfect (on-coming pun warning) launch pad for paintings?

-the images from hubble, other telescopes, the rovers, and various spacecraft, which are most often seen in artificial color, are in their way art. do we need space paintings? can they tickle our “holy crap!” bone any better than photographs which for all their accuracy are still of places and phenomena we can’t begin to fathom?

not sure really. what i do know is that i’ve long imagined a whole series of space related paintings which i’d like to undertake and if i ever manage to free myself from this website i plan to paint them gosh darn it!

anyhow…

as many of you no doubt know nasa has an art program. quote: From the inception of NASA’s Art Program in 1962, NASA has invited more than 250 American artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, etc in the visual arts, as well as other forms)) to witness firsthand the U.S. space missions and to interpret space flight through their art. In a creative melding of art and science, the artists, responding to space exploration on emotional and spiritual levels, have documented the work of engineers, astronauts and scientists. now that’s exactly the kind of thing i’m talking about. that’s the kind of thing that gets me excited!

for a while a portion of this art program’s output was out there to be viewed, traveling around the country on artrain (an art-museum-on-rails consisting of five silver-painted cars) but that exhibition is long ended. i believe the smithsonian has the space art collection in their holdings, though i don’t remember seeing any of them when i was at the decrepit space center last. luckily some folks over at rhizome saw fit to help nasa out and create an online catalogue of the program’s output. now, i say luckily, and i want to mean it, but really i don’t.

the project is called copernica. quote: The NASA Art Program has commissioned original artworks chronicling the wonders, risks and triumphs of space exploration. In Copernica, we invite you to explore a new universe created from a sampling of this art collection. Zoom in to a star to discover an artwork, or build your own constellation and watch the swirling forms take shape. if you prefer to bypass all the zooming and swirling you can head straight for the alphabetical list of artists.

now there is no question there are some interesting artworks to be seen here. if you are a space lover and an art lover there are goodies to be had. the problem, and the reason i didn’t mean it when i said we were “lucky” rhizome created copernica is this- miserably miniscule 2 inch images!!!!!

jesus-holy-fucking-christ-in-space-and-on-earth!! how many times must i make this same complaint? tiny little images are simply not acceptable! if you, out there, as a web developer or curator, want to put up artwork on the internet, if you want to write about it (n.y. times i’m looking at you!) if you want to celebrate visual art of any stripe, you simply

must

include decent sized images for us to look at. can that fact be any more obvious?!

in the case of copernica there is essentially no other point. there is very little text. copernica is ostensibly there to let you enjoy these space related images. but how? how in jupiter’s name are we supposed to enjoy them? half of them are not even shown right side up but sideways to fit the form factor… now come on. wtf? the swirling points of data light, the zooming, the redistribution on click is real nifty, yeah, whoopee! but i tell you what, it’s fucking pointless when the payoff is a 2 inch thumbnail. is it bandwidth concerns? well i’ll tell you what, if you scrapped this fucking thing and offered me a bare bones list of plates that i could actually see i’d be far happier.

so as it stands, though copernica is a nice idea which seems to offer, upon first glance, a vacation from the usual ghetto of space art, it is in fact just a tease. you’ll have to mine it for artist names and painting titles then do your own google-fu if you want to see anything exciting.

if any of you out there have links to worthwhile space related paintings, offered up in a manner not requiring an electron microscope to view, please fire away in comments.