Spacehip in Saturn’s Rings

“Spaceship in Saturn’s Rings” is one of my earlier works and the first I felt was truly successful. It is ink drawn with Rapidograph pens and airbrushed on paper and was completed in 1983. It was part of an assignment to apply all I had just learned about creating the imperssion of space. Denise Zingg had probably expected me to use perspective lines to create space. Instead I created it by using size, placement and texture.

The subject is a spaceship inside of the rings of Saturn, which are made up of rocky snowballs. The real thing wouldn’t be as tightly packed as this, but this is more interesting. The subject comes from my love of astronomy and science fiction, being specifically inspired by “The Martian Way” by Isaac Asimov, where Martian colonists go to Saturn to bring back some of the ice asteroids as a source of water to terraform the planet.

Ink and airbrush are two media I have used too rarely. I need to get back to them and also to space art. How do I fit this in with my new fascination with Leonardo and the Renaissance? Science and the exploration of what is real fits perfectly with Leonardo’s endless curiosity about nature and invention. I think he would have been involved in science fiction if he had lived more recently. Or maybe not since our interest in science is due to the ideas of Leonardo. Without him maybe there wouldn’t have been the scientific awakening. So I owe my combined interest with art and science to Leonardo, who was the first to dream of a rational and scientific future. I think this is the foundation of focusing what my work is about.