Space Art is a general term for art emerging from knowledge and ideas associated with outer space, both as a source of inspiration and as a means for visualizing and promoting space travel.
Whatever the stylistic path, the artist is generally attempting to communicate ideas somehow related to space, often including appreciation of the infinite variety and vastness which surrounds us.
The Cosmos contains many sources of visual inspiration that our growing abilities to gather and propagate has spread through the mass culture. The first photographs of the entire Earth by satellites and manned Apollo missions brought a new sense of our world as an island in empty space and promoted ideas of the essential unity of Humanity.
Photographs taken by explorers on the Moon shared the experience of being on another world. When the famous 'Pillars Of Creation' Hubble Space Telescope image was released people claimed to see the face of Jesus Christ within it. Other similarly evocative Hubble photos exist, especially of Planetary Nebula.
Perhaps such images provide modern audiences with fresh visions through which the religious awe invoked by the great murals in cathedrals of earlier centuries can be experienced anew.
Small art objects were carried on Apollo missions such as gold emblems and a small Fallen Astronaut figurine left on the Moon during the Apollo 15 mission. Visual observations have been recorded in drawings and commentary by earlier Cosmonauts and Astronauts of difficult to photograph phenomena such as the airglow, orbital twilight colors, and outer details of the Solar corona. An able and observant artist can record aspects of the surroundings beyond the design limitations of any particular camera system.
If and when artists finally get to live and play in zero gravity conditions as part of a hoped for migration of Humanity beyond Earth artistic expressions unknowable today will emerge. Although such dreams await substantial opportunity, early efforts by artists to have art pieces placed in space have already been accomplished with both paintings and sculpture.
The first painting to be brought to Earth-orbit was a radiant study of the golden sunlight on a Soviet space station by Russian artist Andrei Sokolov, carried aboard the Soviet Mir space station in the mid 1980s. The first substantial sculpture brought into space was also carried aboard Mir, Arthur Woods' Cosmic Dancer.
Practitioners of the visual arts have for many decades explored space in their imaginations and on their easels.The vast majority of space art output has been pictorial representations of space subjects, realistically and otherwise, using painting and more recently digital media. Science Fiction magazines and picture essay magazines were a major outlet for space art, often featuring planets, space ships and dramatic alien landscapes.
Chesley Bonestell and R. A. Smith were the major artists actively involved in visualizing space exploration proposals with input from experts in the infant rocketry field anxious to spread their ideas to a wider audience. A strength of particularly Bonestell's work was the attempt to portray exotic worlds with their own alien beauty, often giving us a sense of destination as much as of the technological means of getting there. Other forms of pictorial space art bring the viewer to inner visions inspired directly or otherwise by the fruits of the expanding vision of Humanity.
Some aspects of such art pay visual homage to outer space, popular ideas of life on other worlds including alien visitation visions, dream symbology, psychedelic imagery and other influences on contemporary visionary art.
Astronomical art, largely an outgrowth of the artistic standards of Bonestell, is an aspect of space art whose primary emphasis is in giving the viewer visual impressions of alien and exotic places in the Cosmos.
As an Astronomical artist, one should have a sense of why the lighting, sky color, even your chosen landscape surroundings appear as they do, and how a drastic change in a specific condition as on other worlds could alter the scene dramatically. One should have a reasonable 'grounding' in science, the nature of the sky and weather, and Geology for knowing the Earth as well as Astronomy for knowing the heavens. Such artists share with every other conceivable creative expression the vast arena containing what can be called Space Art.