An Artist in Modern Times: On Extraterrestrial Landscapes
Ludek Pesek
Article published in Leonardo, Vol. 5. pp. 297-300. Pergamon Press 1972. Printed in Great Britain
Abstract
The author discusses the uncertain meaning of the terms modern and freedom whenever applied but especially in art. He is of the view that neither of the terms have much significance, although they are so frequently used. His outlook is the result of painting for many years representational landscapes of the planets of the solar system. He describes the problems he has encountered in making such paintings. He defends his conviction that paintings of this kind still have value, in spite of close-up photographs now available of the lunar surface and better ones of Mars than could be obtained before the space age by means of telescopes on the Earth. Furthermore, he continues to obtain aesthetic inspiration from extraterrestrial sources.
I
I do not know exactly what the word 'modern' means. Modern refers to today but also to last Friday and the Friday of two years ago. I am not sure how far back in time the word modern applies. When the painter, whose name is not known, drew a buffalo on the wall of the Altamira cave, the time he lived in was, obviously, modern time for him and what he longed to make was modern art. I am not a sophist but I wish to indicate how inscrutable the word 'modern' is, even if it is connected with something as venerable as fine art.
In life, one must constantly put up with behavior and decisions that are against common sense reason. The continued existence of mankind depends on some of these decisions, for instance, the production of arms of mass destruction. These arms are certainly modern. Wars and physical violence are certainly not manifestations of modern time; only the dimension of the absurdities is new. For instance, for the destruction of each human being, a power equivalent to some fifteen tons of TNT is in the arsenals. This is certainly a modern situation, for, when swords were a principal weapon, it would have been deemed absurd to make thousands of swords for killing one man.
I find that the word 'freedom' is as deceitful as the word 'modern'. Certainly, during modern times some societies have increased the amount of individual freedom, usually through violence. Only with slight irony do I consider it a noteworthy and new aspect of freedom for young girls to walk in the street in mini-or maxi-skirts; for a man to go into an elegant restaurant without a necktie and without his hair cut; for a writer to publish texts dealing with highly private matters; for a man who hijacks an airplane to be considered a hero; for a diplomat to be exchanged for one hundred ordinary citizens etc. Today in human relations little remains to surprise or amaze one and I find the same can be said of what is still called the fine arts.
One old, curious, everlasting legend has been that artists are always in the first row of fighters for freedom of thinking and working. Sometimes I wonder if a feudal serf toiling on a field of his lord was not more free than an artist portraying the countess in the style of his time. I do not know how to say it more clearly. Maybe this way: the serf worked against his will with a forehead frowned with hatred, while the artist put on handcuffs daily with a smile on his lips. While the serf at least suspected the reason for his hated slavery, the artist tried by every means to protect and strengthen his beloved slavery.
I have not in mind the kind of prostitution that means 'here is my work, give me money', as this kind of prostitution is legally practiced by most human beings. I have in mind artistic slavery to a style of a certain period. Artists who fought for their freedom of expression generally were doing nothing more than what they thought was required by their modern time. More precisely, artists thought and worked according to the way they were molded by their environment. I do not think an individual is as important as historical accounts would have one believe. Alexander the Great did not create a world empire; Napoleon did not destroy thrones; Hitler was not alone responsible for Nazi Germany; Stalin did not win World War II. As far as art is concerned, Proxileles did not develop classic art and Picasso did not invent modern art. They have been made into monuments and symbols; they are boulders ejected by the pressure of glowing, over-powering magma of the time from the depths of the world. They are boulders that become cold and disappear in the dust of time.
Time changes the appearance and meaning of things. The great efforts of artists that once looked so rebellious and revolutionary, in the end, harden to a kind of hard-shelled nut that art historians politely call the artistic style of the time, writing heaps of words about it. Their books and articles are detailed inventories of prisons: building, cells, barred windows, chains and refuse buckets. Actually there have been very few, if any, really free artists in historical times.
During my lifetime I have watched the fight of 'isms' in the art world. Artists have professed with a religious fervor the advantages of a style; the praises degenerating into liturgical ceremonies. How many artists have spent themselves searching for a 'personal style' which later could be seen as nothing more than acceptance of a modern convention holding sway at that moment ? It is a sad irony of destiny that the arsenal of weapons produced by artists to defend one ism or another end up in the hands of dogmatic aesthetes and pretentious experts. I am convinced that the harm done by the knights of these crusades is much greater than would be done by an army of amateur barber-painters. Personally, I prefer the poetry of a swan on a lake painted by an amateur to the coolly calculated style of a work of a mass-media proclaimed 'master'.
II
When I went to school, what seems to me a long time ago, I was bored with physics. While our professor lectured on the composition and orbits of the planets of the solar system, I drew lunar landscapes in the copybooks of my schoolmates. The mathematics scattered about on the blackboard was too abstract for me. Fanciful landscapes meant much more to me. At that time, it did not occur to me that thirty years later my enthusiasm for extraterrestrial landscapes would become a professional art activity close to my heart.
He who has experienced real difficulties on the Earth will understand easily why one might long to escape them by one means or another—through religion, through alcohol, through drugs. A painter can escape to some extent by cruising on the ocean of non-figurative art. For five years, I took this trip but I found it monotonous and its promised freedom illusory.
To be romantic and highly emotional about art during the second half of the twentieth century is not much appreciated by dominant realists. These traits have always complicated my life. Twenty-five years ago when my schoolmates started their careers as surgeons, lawyers and engineers, I wanted to climb Kilimanjaro, to cross Africa on a motor-cycle, to go to Australia in a motor-boat, to found an alligator farm in Colombia (I feel somewhat ashamed to speak of some of my more exotic projects). None of these dreams materialized because I lacked the know-how for meeting the practical realities for their achievement.
As a middle-aged man, I decided, much sooner than Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, to leave the planet Earth. My first stop was on the Moon. My romanticism became grounded on a distant reality for I read much on astronomy and looked for many hours at the Moon. I then began to sketch the lunar landscape. I established the heights and profiles of a terrain from the lengths of shadows on a telescopic photograph of the region around the crater Hyginus. This was the beginning of my series of lunar and planetary landscape paintings. I was fascinated by the thought that I was creating not a fanciful landscape but one that really exists.
I became obsessed with the desire to make them as accurate as possible. Unfortunately, astronomers like to use words like 'perhaps', 'probably', 'it is possible', 'it seems'. Such qualifications are of little use to one making a realistic painting. In 1960, experts of the Moon said it has a broken surface of glassy slag; a thin layer of dust covering gravel— a thick layer of dust; there were stones—there were no stones; there was erosion—there was no erosion, so mountains had sharp peaks, etc. I made my lunar landscapes in 1961 amidst this chaos of opinion [1]. I do not feel ashamed of them when now I compare them to the photographs taken by astronauts from the Moon's surface.
One might ask what is the point of trying to paint realistic landscapes of extraterrestrial bodies when excellent close-up photographs of the surface of the Moon and much better photographs than telescopic ones of Mars are now available? This is, however, a superficial question. It is true, there are now close-up photographs of the lunar surface but the number of features that have been photographed is still very small. Close-up photographs of the Martian surface have not as yet been taken. Detailed photographs of other planets and of their satellites cannot be expected for many years. Thus, the landscapes I paint, based on the best information I can obtain, still serve a practical didactic purpose, even if one neglects their aesthetic qualities [2].
After many years of work, which would have been exhausting if it were not at the same time a joy, I have come to the conclusion that most planetologists make errors when they try to give visual representation to what they understand from their specialized studies because they have not developed the skill to make viual representation such as paintings. No doubt, one cannot expect that future planetologists will be trained as painters, therefore, painters of extraterrestrial landscapes must study what has been learned about them in astronomy. If this is not done, the landscapes can only be classed as being in the domain of science fiction, in which I find little science.
When in 1969 I was commissioned by the National Geographic Society, Washington D.C. [3], to prepare a series of paintings of the planets, arrangements were made for me to consult leading American planetologists. Of course, I found that there was rarely unanimity in their interpretation of available information. Paintings I made for the Society entitled 'Saturn from its Satellite Titan', 'Mercury', 'Mars from Phobos' and 'Saturn' are shown in Figs. 1, 2, 3 and 4 (cf. color plate). I would like to particularly mention in this domain of art the work of Chesley Bonestell [4, 5].
Recently I have made a series of surrealistic paintings using lunar landscapes as backgrounds to earthly symbols of violence and hypocrisy (Figs. 5,6 and 7). Perhaps these backgrounds will draw the attention of those viewers who have been overexposed to the landscapes of our Earth.
Fig. 1. ‘Saturn from its Satellite "Titan"',
Tempera, 38 x 50 cm., 1969.
(Photo courtesy of © The National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.)
Fig. 2. 'Mercury',
Tempera, 38 x 50 cm, 1969.
(Photo courtesy of © National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.)
Fig. 3. 'Mars from Phobos’
Tempera, 38 x 50 cm, 1969.
(Photo courtesy of © National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.)
Fig. 5. 'Rewards of Merit’
oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm, 1970.
Fig. 6. ‘Presence of God’
oil on canvas, 80 x 130 cm, 1970.
Fig. 7. 'One Hundred Well-Guarded Heroes',
oil on canvas, 80 x 130cm, 1970.
III
Freedom is an intimate, private matter. A political prisoner can be more free than a politician speaking on the necessity of freedom to his supporters. With freedom are connected love and hatred; peace and violence; abstinence and self-indulgence. The planets cannot escape the gravitational pull of the Sun and man cannot escape reality, even though he keeps on dreaming of doing so.
I believe that art is also an intimate private matter. A single line on a piece of paper might give one more aesthetic satisfaction than a stately framed work in a museum. A man kneeling on the ground with lowered head while dreaming of the stars can be likened to mankind dreaming of freedom-giving revolution. This is an unbearably theatrical and absurd condition and it is why modern freedom and modern art seem to me as absurd as my paintings. I paint as simply as possible in order to be understood. I am not interested in developing new painting techniques or new artistic visual conceptions [6] and the opinion of art critics give me neither pleasure nor pain. Perhaps, after many years of thinking in terms of extraterrestrial space, I may have lost contact with earthly dimensions but, if I have, I do not suffer from the loss.
REFERENCES
1. J. Sadil and L. Pesek, The Moon and the Planets (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1963).
2. D. A. Hardy, The Role of the Artist in Astronautics, Spaceflight 12, 14(1970).
3. National Geographic, 138 (No. 2, Aug. 1970).
4. Illustrations of C. Bonestell ;^ Man and the Moon, R. S. Richardson, ed. (New \^.k: World Publishing Co., 1961).
5. Personal Profile: Chesley Bonestell, Space Artist, Spaceflight 11,82 (1969).
6. F. J. Malina, On the Visual Fine Arts in the Space Age, Leonardo 3, 323 (1970).
Un artiste à l'époque moderne: paysages extraterrestres
Résumé—L'auteur rend compte de l'imprécision des termes moderne et liberté'd'une manière générale, et plus particulièrement quand ils s'appliquent au domaine artistique. Jl pense que ces deux termes n'ont guère de sens bien qu'ils soient d'un usage très courant. Cette conception est le résultat de nombreuses années de peinture de paysages des planètes du système solaire. Il explique les problèmes auxquels il a été confronté dans son oeuvre. Il est convaincu que de tels tableaux ont encore un sens, bien que l'on dispose désormais de photos très précises du sol lunaire, et de clichés de Mars meilleurs que ceux que l'on pouvait obtenir avant l'ère spatiale grâce aux télescopes. Bien plus, les phénomènes extraterrestres sont encore pour lui une source d'inspiration esthétique.
Editors note: The author wishes to make the following additional comments on Figures; 1, 3 and 4:
Fig. 1—Titan, a satellite of Saturn, has a thin atmosphere and is covered with snow. Its orbit is in the plane of the rings of Saturn, therefore, the rings would be seen as a line.
Fig. 3—From Phobos, a satellite of Mars, only the layer of atmosphere of Mars, illuminated by the Sun, would be seen. The layer was first recorded by the U.S.A. spacecraft Mariners 6 and 7.
Fig. 4 (color plate)—The painting shows an imaginary view of the material making up the rings of Saturn as it would be seen looking towards the planet. The material is believed to consist of snow-covered rocks.
Article published in Leonardo, Vol. 5. pp. 297-300. Pergamon Press 1972. Printed in Great Britain