The Artist Comments on the Art

"I was born before the Space Age. I have had the good fortune to have lived to witness our first tentative steps from our own world and watch as they quickly became giant leaps to the outer planets. I am also honored that, in a small way, my own published work helped chronicle this momentous era of exploration ('created when it happened', as I like to add).

Modern space-faring ships of discovery with names like Apollo, Venera, Hubble, Mariner and Viking, along with increasingly sophisticated ground-based observations, showed a universe far more beautiful, wondrous--and violent--than the one (I thought) I knew as a kid. The avalanche of new knowledge had an inevitable, inspirational effect on me.

I still, however, fondly recall a brief time early in my own life before everything seemed to change, when I would spend summer nights gazing at the tangled starclouds of Sagittarius drifting over the treetops from the backyard of my childhood home (a somewhat more difficult feat today). The sky I watched and and the universe I knew then was really not all that much removed from the one watched by our ancestors for centuries. To be sure, I knew of Jupiter's moons, Saturn's rings, and that comets and solar eclipses were not the cause for fear they once were (although the sense of wonder certainly remained undiminished). But, blissfully unmindful of still-to-come evidence of volcanic moons and black holes or threats from rogue asteroids and nearby gamma-ray bursters, sky watching for me back then was more a pursuit of quiet contemplation--just as it had been for millennia. Recent advances in astronomical knowledge have since managed to change how I look at the night sky forever. The sense of benign mystery I always associated with the stars is now tinged with a certain uneasiness.

Much of the art presented here, then, represents somewhat of a dichotomy. Some of it depicts what I believe to be the most significant era of exploration in history, paying tribute not only to the dazzling discoveries I was privileged to watch unfold, but also to the human ingenuity that made them possible. Other scenes simply show the serene, quiet beauty of the night sky, and perhaps betray my own longing for the bygone days of E.E. Barnard, Percival Lowell--and the darker skies of my youth.

I most enjoy creating scenes that depict the universe from our own planetary perspective, whether gazing at an spectacular comet from the plains of the Serengeti, or looking over the shoulder of one of our robot spacecraft as it explores Mars. They are my attempt to define our modest place in it all. As has already been pointed out, we didn't just start going into space recently--we have, in fact, always been there."

- Jim Hervat