Bonestell, ‘400,000 Lt. years out from Our Galaxy’ (1970)

 


Chesley Bonestell painted this for the cover of the October 1970 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He was 82. It demonstrates the qualities for which he is celebrated: the clarity, the attention to realist detail, the astronomical scope and scale: a sublime image. On the back of the board is written: ‘400,000 Lt. years out from Our Galaxy, on hypothetical planet | Galaxy tipped approx. 30° | Thin atmosphere on planet | Red star above galaxy center locates Solar System | M31 — Andromeda — at far right | M33 — Just above galaxy | Magellanic clouds, extreme L.’ Bonstell has scrupulously researched the relevant cosmic bodies and their relative orientations and positions from this notional point, and reproduced as accurately as he could what it would look like. Inside the issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction for which it was commissioned—the magazine's 21st Anniversary ‘All-Star Issue’—Bonstell explains the perspective he has adopted.

We are viewing the Milky Way from a planet with a very thin atmosphere 400,000 light years out in space ... our galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter and its plane is inclined 30 degrees to the line of sight (the left side being the near side) ... The few stars visible are wanderers, which have escaped from galaxies and are drifting through space, and our hypothetical planet from which the picture is taken is presumably orbiting one of these.
All this astronomical specificity pulls the image towards the representational, the quasi-photographic; but the piece works as much as an example of abstract art: the dark blocks and slabs of Rothkoesque black, grey and ultramarine, the tangled swirl of the Milky Way like a burst of luminous Jackson Pollock right of centre, together with the splodges of the lesser galaxies, and the curving echoes of that dominant spiral in the landscape of the imaginary world. It is a superb compositional balance.


    

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