Red Star In Space

I had to Photoshop the heck out of this picture just to get it as clear as it is now. This was taken back in the days of film cameras with adjustable exposures and I was, to put it bluntly, a crappy photographer. But in a way the grainy, washed out colors are reminiscent of the poorly printed reproductions of cover art in old science fiction pulp magazines.

This picture is called "Red Star in Space" and it is meant to recall not only pulp illustration but the Soviet Russian era of space exploration in which ungainly spacecraft were launched on perilous missions for the Motherland. That same Soviet space program was glorified by fantastic Russian artists who are unknown in the West. Note the red star illuminating the planet. The Russian artists would add a fantasy design element to a spacecraft which doesn't need streamlining at all in the vacuum of space. A spaceship could look like a tank and still do all the things it needed to do. But this is the Future, and things are streamlined in the Future.

"Red Star in Space" is acrylic on illustration board, 9" x 11", February 1995.