Look to the Skies: 6 Artists Whose Art Is out of This World

Painting the sky, the stars, and the planets is a skill as old as time itself. Long before we as a species knew anything about the universe and our place within it, artists were looking upwards to the skies for inspiration. These are six of the best examples of art inspired by outer space over the centuries.

1. Giovanni di Paolo (1403–1482) 

Siennese master Giovanni di Paolo brings together two of the most potent stories in the Bible—the Creation and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise—in this mesmeric panel entitled The Creation of the World and The Expulsion from Paradise (1445).

On the left, God is being carried above the Earth he has created by a host of angels. Di Paolo has positioned Earth at the center of a celestial globe, ringed by bands depicting first the four elements—water, fire, air, and earth—then the sun and other planets, and finally the constellations.

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2. Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) 

Credited with bringing the Renaissance to Northern Europe and lauded as the finest printmaker the world has ever seen, Albrecht Dürer, born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1471, was a polymath par excellence. A writer, a painter, a graphic artist, an engraver, and a woodcutter, he was the Midas of the art world—the man with the golden touch.

His two celestial maps—Map of the Northern Sky and Map of the Southern Sky (c1515)—produced from woodcuts, are the two oldest star charts printed in Europe and the first to place the constellations accurately. The Map of the Northern Hemisphere depicts Aratus, Ptolemy, Al-Sufi, and Marcus Manilius—the leading astronomers from Ancient Greece, Egypt, Persia, and Rome respectively—each holding a globe.

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3. Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827–1895)

Few artists capture the mysteries of space in such wonder-filled images as Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, who settled in Massachusetts in 1851 after fleeing France following a coup d’état by Napoleon III. Trouvelot produced more than 7,000 drawings of the solar system and the splendor and accuracy of his work so impressed the director of Harvard College Observatory that he invited him to join his staff.

Fifteen of the illustrations he produced during that time were published by Charles Scribner’s Sons as The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings (1882). Each one is an enchanting representation of his observations, exquisitely executed in pastels over a period of years and each one captivates the heart and mind with its aliveness. The movement captured in The November Meteors, The Great Comet of 1881, Aurora Borealis, and even in Planet Saturn, which you can almost see rotating, keeps you transfixed for hours. Yet for all that, Trouvelot wrote that “no human skill can reproduce upon paper the majestic beauty and radiance of the celestial objects”. Admirers of his work would disagree.

4. Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

“This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” wrote van Gogh to his brother Theo, describing the view from his window at the Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint Rémy, where he was a patient between May 1889 and May 1890. It was a view that inspired dozens of artworks, including The Starry Night, one of his most emotionally charged and absorbing pieces. The painting is dominated by an agitated, dense sky punched with burning golden stars, the Moon and Venus, while in the foreground a cypress tree—a symbol of death and mourning—reaches upwards towards the swirling blues of heaven.

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“Vincent van Gogh, La Nuit Étoilée,” at the Atelier des Lumières, Paris, until December 31st, 2019, is a digital exhibition that takes visitors into the heart of the artist’s most celebrated works, including The Starry Night (1889). The 35-minute sound and light show tells van Gogh’s story through the projections of his pictures, screened on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the gallery.

5. Lucien Rudaux (1874–1947)

Artist and astronomer Lucien Rudaux’s passionate love affair with the galaxy began when he was a child in Normandy and never waned. He built his first telescope when he was only 10 years old, then joined the Société Astronomique de France when he was 18. He set up his own observatory in his parents’ garden in Donville-les-Bains not long after, photographing the Moon and planets and creating an atlas of the Milky Way.

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His images were engrossing, but it was Rudaux’s skyscapes that earned him his reputation as the grandfather of space art. Combining aesthetic beauty, extraordinary imagination, and accurate representation, they were decades ahead of their time, showing the planets as he envisaged they’d look from their neighboring moons, and holding up well even now. Interestingly, Rudaux also tried his hand at depicting aliens, and in one painting showed them as multi-limbed creatures with human torsos, waving cheerfully at each other and wearing jaunty hats. A 65 km crater on Mars is named after him.

6. Katie Paterson

Scottish artist Katie Paterson has exhibited at London’s Hayward Gallery and Tate Britain, New York’s Guggenheim, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. She has worked with NASA and the European Space Agency to create evocative pieces that live long in the mind and spirit.

At its most simplistic, her work is based on the wonder of nature—its vulnerability and resilience, its ephemerality, and its endurability—and on her endless fascination with the cosmos. In Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky (2012-2014), she melted and recast back into its original shape a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite before launching part of it back into space, and in All the Dead Stars (2009), she charts the original location of 27,000 extinguished stars. Totality (2016) is a mirrored ball that depicts almost every solar eclipse ever documented, from drawings that are centuries old to recent photographs.