new artwork "crew dragon"
The historic “Crew Dragon Demo-2“ Mission was launched on 30th of May 2020 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Nine years after the end of the Space Shuttle program for the first time an American rocket with a crewed spaceship launched from American soil to the International Space Station. Build by the commercial company SpaceX, the Crew Dragon capsule brought the 2 astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley on a NASA mission to the ISS. Recently people are talking about the beginning of a new era in space exploration, the so-called space renaissance. The “Crew Dragon Demo-2“ mission can be considered as a milestone of this new era. The spaceship´s futuristic interior design, the blue glowing interactive screens and the sharp looking white space suits of the astronauts also mark the beginning of a new visual aesthetic in human spaceflight. Many of these details remember Stanley Kubrick´s visionary movie 2001 – A Space Odyssey.
The composition of the artwork “crew dragon“ merges several photographs from NASA and SpaceX archives. It includes all relevant components of the mission, e.g. the two astronauts, the futuristic space suits, the blue shimmering touch panels, the capsule, the launch tower with its mobile bridge, the launch itself and the ISS. The palimpsest-like layering and the different levels of transparency of the picture elements dissolve in a soft, cloud-like digital brushstroke. The visual composition is inspired by Michelangelo´s famous painting “The Creation of Adam“, widely considered as a key work of the Italian Renaissance. The center of the image highlights the hand of an astronaut holding a pen. All compositional alignments run into this focus point. The writing and painting hand symbolizes the human ability to create.