Don
Dixon
One of the most renowned space artists of his
generation, Don Dixon got an early start. He remembers seeing a
shooting star when he was just four years old and drawing a picture of
it with crayons when he got home.
"That was my first astronomical rendering," he says.
"Then I started reading science fiction and discovering the work of
Chesley Bonestell. He was the granddaddy of us all."
Now, Don's work has graced the covers of magazines like
OMNI, Smithsonian World, Astronomy, Sky and Telescope and Scientific
American as well as more than 60 novel covers, including the
award-winning Red/Green/Blue Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Don has also done design concepts for Disney's EPCOT
Center and Caesar's Palace casino. And he now serves as the art
director for the world famous Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles,
Calif.
But it's easy to see how greatly his work has been
influenced by Chesley Bonestell. At first, he says, he thought
Bonestell's paintings were actually photographs.
"It amazed me to realize that somebody could create a
picture that could fool you into thinking it was a photograph," he
recalls. "So I laboriously tried to learn to paint like Bonestell."
And we, here at the Cosmic Cafe's Outer Space Art Gallery, believe he
has succeeded. What do you think?

Europa
Probe

Red
Dwarf Rising

Uranus
To
see more of Don's wonderful work, take the rocketship to his
website

Catch a ride on the
flying saucer back
to the Outer Space Art Gallery homepage
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