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