NSS Space Art Gallery

The Space Art of Walter Myers

I was born in 1958 in southern Indiana. For as long as I can remember I enjoyed drawing, especially pictures of dinosaurs and monsters. In 1965 at age 7 I became enamored with astronomy after coming across a single volume from a children’s encyclopedia set (a family friend had found the book in the garage of a house they had just purchased). The book featured photo-realistic illustrations of the planets of the Solar System. They were like nothing I’d ever seen before.

Around that same time a friend had a book with fanciful illustration by space artist Chesley Bonestell of astronauts walking the surface of a moon of Saturn, with Saturn itself looming huge on the horizon. To me that was the most beautiful scenario I could imagine—to be walking the surface of a world with Saturn dominating the sky. Over the next few years I made hundreds of space art pencil drawings.

I became very concerned about realism in space art, preferring objective and science-based photorealism to expressionism or worse: artists who simply got the details wrong. In 1968 I had the good fortune to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when it was released in the original 3-projector Cinerama format. 2001 heightened my interest in space exploration and appreciation for the aesthetic of otherworldly wildernesses.

My sole medium today is computer graphics created on standard desktop computers running Microsoft Windows. Prior to discovering computer graphics, I worked in pencil, then oil paints, water colors and acrylics. While some artists did—and still do—flourish in these traditional mediums, I personally never found them well-suited to the photorealistic space art I pursued, and I simply never seemed to have the patience for them. It wasn’t until high-end computer graphics software became available for the home computer in the latter 1990s that I finally found a medium that, by easily rendering straight lines and elegant circles, met my needs.

My work has been published in just about every media format available: Books, magazines, posters, websites, television, CDs/DVDs, and framed for galleries. Clients include:

Adler Planetarium Astronomy Magazine Capstone Press Discovery Channel Hadley Rille Books Hearst Art Gallery ITV Granada Macmillan Publishing NASA National Geographic Channel

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich Oxford University Press Pearson Education The Planetary Society Popular Mechanics Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Scientific American Sky and Telescope WGBH/NOVA

Artist's Web Site: http://www.arcadiastreet.com/cgvistas/

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