David A. Hardy - Exploring His
Worlds! [Interview by Dee-Marie] If possible, renowned British artist and
author, David A. Hardy, would be spending his afternoons riding his
motorbike around the rings of Saturn, but for now, he is content to
create amazing images of the planet's surface for us to marvel at.
For over 50 years, David's fascination with outer space has
produced some of the most significant planetary artwork of the past
century. With co-creator Sir Patrick Moore, David has showcased his
lifelong fascination with the universe in the recent publication
of: Futures: 50 Years in Space - The Challenge of the
Stars. This beautiful coffee-table book uniquely
combines a fascinating look into the cosmos through text and art.
Recently, I had the great honor to interview this amazing man. He
graciously shared his insights into creating realistic
out-of-this-world images, as well as a few of his other outstanding
achievements.
How did growing up in Birmingham (Britain's second largest city)
shape your views on art and astronomy? I was born and bred in
Bournville, Birmingham, where I lived for the first 26 years of my
life (apart from my 2-year stint in the RAF). There was no TV until
the 1950s, though I saw the movie Destination Moon in 1950,
and enjoyed Journey into Space on BBC radio. Most of my
'input' was from books; encyclopedias, books on astronomy (many
very old and dated) that I found in my local libraries, and so on.
It was in 1954 that I illustrated my first book for Patrick Moore;
I had joined the British Interplanetary Society in 1952, and
it was then that I began to meet people with a belief that humans
would go into space, and land on the Moon and planets. I produced
exhibition paintings for the BIS, and began to illustrate more
books, and from 1957 The Sky at Night - Patrick Moore's
now-long-running TV program. You left your job as a corporate
artist with Cadbury (chocolates), to make a living as a freelance
artist. What gave you the courage to take that leap-of-faith at
that specific time in your life? I joined Cadbury's in 1956,
when I left the RAF, and worked in their Sales office for some
years while awaiting a vacancy in the Studio. That, at least,
taught me how to keep accounts and make out invoices when I became
freelance. I did move into the Design office, where, I not only
painted chocolate boxes and packaging of all kinds (and gained a
lot of experience in illustration), but became responsible for all
their Christmas and Easter catalogues. But it was being asked to
work on a new film - which became 2001: A Space Odyssey - in
1965, that gave me the impetus to leave my job and go freelance.
The film job never came off (the full story may be found in
Hardyware: The Art of David A. Hardy) but it
served its purpose. With digital artwork; a paintbrush morphed
into a Wacom pen, paints are now mixed in Photoshop, and a computer
monitor replaced the traditional canvas. You created your first
science fiction artwork in your early teens, before the advent of
computer generated art, how has modern technology changed the way
you approach your art, or has it? Many people think that
"computer-generated art" can be produced at the click of a button.
With some programs this is almost true, but you can always tell!
The artist who has a background in traditional techniques always
has an advantage, because he/she has a solid background in
composition, perspective and many other disciplines which are
invaluable. So I see the Mac just as another tool really - pushing
pixels around instead of paint. Where the computer really helps is
in things like ellipses. When I think of the times I've painted
Saturn's rings, or the orbits of the Solar System, with lines of
exact thickness and no kinks. In Photoshop you can do it just like
this [snaps fingers]. You have come a long way from your first
computer in 1985 - an Atari ST 520 with only 512k of Ram - to your
current PowerMac. How has the advancement in technology influenced
your art? My current Mac is a PowerMac G4 1.25GHz with 2GB of
RAM. I used to try to create graphics on my Atari, but everything
was very jagged (huge pixels) and circles looked like octagons!
Even so, as I got more powerful machines and better software came
out, my work improved until I was able to create work that looked
reasonable. I even printed my digital images and then worked over
them in acrylics and airbrush. When you started your journey
into digital imagery, Photoshop was your preferred software for
creating your breathtaking terrains. In your current collaboration
(Futures: 50 Years in Space, The Challenge of the
Stars) with good friend, astronomer and author Sir Patrick
Moore, you added Terragen software to your digital painting tools.
How has your discovery of Terragen changed the way you view
computer generated art, and has it had a significant effect on your
current artwork? Also, why did you pick Terragen over other scenery
generating software programs such as Bryce or MojoWorld?
It was serendipity really. I'd seen some work created in
Terragen by other artists, but Terragen was then
PC-only, and I was frustrated. Then, just in time for
Futures, Jo Meder released a beta version for Mac. He kindly
lifted the restrictions on size and commercial use, and I was able
to produce bump-maps in Photoshop, test them out as terrains in
Terragen, tweak them, then take them back as landscapes into
Photoshop to add skies, planets, and to give them a 'look' which I
hoped was more like Hardy than Terragen. From the reviews I've
seen, especially from Ron Miller, (who also uses the PC version and
whose work is featured in Renderosity
Digital Art for the 21st Century ), I seem to have
succeeded! I have tried Bryce and Mojoworld, and although they are
interesting I never found them easy to work with; the interface of
Bryce is particularly quirky, but I respect the abilities of those
artists who can and do work with them. But, the moment I installed
Terragen and played with it, I thought: "YES. I can use this!"
Do you feel there is a difference between astronomical art and
science fiction art, if so, how would you classify your images?
I started out as a space artist, highly influenced by Chesley
Bonestell, whose book with Willy Ley, The Conquest of Space,
blew my mind in 1951. Interestingly, it was in 1970, just around
the time that fiction became fact and men landed on the Moon, that
my first SF work was published. Obviously there's a lot of
overlapping, but space art must be based entirely upon fact, and
stick to the laws of the universe. So even in my SF work, I never
paint anything that is scientifically impossible. Many SF artists
aren't bothered by this, and just use their imagination - which is
fine, if it works for them. You also added Photography to your
art arsenal - Have you segued from traditional photography to
digital cameras, and more importantly, to digital camera
telescopes? I've always taken photographs, and that includes
taking 6 x 6cm (2 1/4" square) slides of my work to send to
publishers etc. As you say, I started getting seriously into it
around 1980, when I built a darkroom in a tiny cloakroom under our
stairs - it was just high enough at one end for the enlarger. I
used to take mainly black-and-white photos; partly because they're
easier to process yourself (I later did colour too) but also
because I see this as an art form in its own right. Oddly enough,
now that I have a new Cannon EOS 300D digital SLR camera, I'm
intending to go back into B&W work! (I've had digital cameras for
several years, starting with a Nikon Coolpix.) I'm a bit ashamed to
say that I haven't observed for years; the images that we get from
space, from probes and the HST, have completely superseded anything
I could do, and I'm busy enough without getting into CCDs and
stuff. Your artwork hangs on the walls of some very influential
people, has been featured in books [both fiction and nonfiction],
appeared on magazine covers, in films [The Neverending Story],
record covers, and as video game packaging. Which has been your
favorite media to create artwork for? I don't really have a
favourite. I love variety and hate being stuck in a rut. So it's
great, after working on a 22" monitor for weeks or months, to drag
out a big 3 x 4-ft canvas and slap some paint on it.
 
But I do enjoy commissions: producing a nice big painting to go on
someone's wall, based on what they want - but often only vaguely,
and it's a great challenge and a great sense of achievement if you
can then show them a work to which they say "Yes - that's just how
I imagined!" Has your work on computer games been restricted to
package cover art, or have you also ventured into 3D animation?
I've only scratched the surface of that side of things. I'm envious
of those who can do it, and keep telling myself I must set aside
some time to learn to do it. Maybe one day. Back in the Atari days
I produced some 360 degree panoramic backgrounds, in 16 colours,
for a game called Kristal, against which the characters
moved. This got very good critical reviews, actually. With your
knowledge in science, literature, art, technology, music, and
motorcycles - you truly are a modern day Renaissance man. Of all of
your areas of expertise, which are you most passionate about?
Oh, art, undoubtedly. But, I love music and listen to it constantly
while I work - nowadays played from a 40GB iPod over my stereo
system. I've just produced a DVD of my images with classical music,
but it's Zone 2 (PAL) only at present. I'm also a frustrated rock
guitarist; I have a Fender Stratocaster (Squier) which I play
around with, and I've met a lot of famous guitarists over the years
(again, see Hardyware!), like Hank Marvin of the Shadows, and Brian
May of Queen, and my one regret is that I don't have the talent to
play really well. You have an amazing "artistic-eye" for seeing
beauty in everyday surroundings, which is very evident in your
morphing of a shabby railway station's waiting room into a stunning
Antarctic landscape [the complete transformation can be viewed on
David A. Hardy's AstroArt ]. Do you feel that
your gift of pre-visualizing images is something any artist can
obtain with practice and patience? Also, did you have any formal
art training, or are you self-taught?  I've now incorporated that sequence into my video
presentation, which I gave for the first time at Worldcon
(Noreascon 4) in Boston in 2004. Yes, I'm sure anyone's eye can be
trained in this way, but it's probably also 'in the genes', don't
you think? I'm basically self-taught. While at Cadbury's I did
receive two scholarships to go to the Birmingham School of Art, but
I did things like life drawing and sculpture - the sort of thing
that your Mum doesn't like you doing at home! Please tell us
about Bhen the Alien, that you so lovingly created in 1973 -
how did he become associated with the Electrical Eggs
organization?
Somewhere around 1970 I had the idea of writing and illustrating a
book for children, using a 'benevolent' green alien to show two
children around the Universe. I brought in a friend, Anthony
Naylor, who I met at Cadbury's, because he's a natural cartoonist
and caricaturist, which I'm not (something else that's in the
genes, I think), and we used Plasticene to design this character. I
never found a publisher for the book, but in 1975 I did send a
painting with Bhen looking at Viking on Mars to Ed Ferman at The
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He loved it! Carl Sagan
bought the original, and it became the first of at least ten 'Bhen'
covers. As a sort of 'interplanetary hobo' he almost always makes
unorthodox use of NASA hardware, and I've had letters from quite a
few NASA/JPL scientists, saying that he could explain some of the
strange results they've got back! A few years ago I heard that
Electrical Eggs (who try to provide access at SF conventions
for the disabled) were asking artists for suitable work. I don't
know why, but I thought immediately of Alien, from the
movie, but replacing him with Bhen, and the slogan "In Space, NO
ONE Can Hear!". I also use this in my video show now, because all
of my 'slides' are captioned.<
Your "spacescapes" appear to be influenced by the works of
Thomas Cole - the father of the Hudson School of Art (who
ironically was born in Lancashire, England), and astronomical
artist Chesley Bonestell, with a dash of Picasso. Is there a
specific artist or art movement that you lean towards in your own
creations? All space artists (I'm Euro Vice President of the
IAAA) see the Hudson
River School as their immediate forebears. We hold workshops in the
most 'alien' parts of Planet Earth, such as Iceland, Hawaii's
volcanoes, Utah's canyonlands. In February 2005, we're going back
to Death Valley, the scene of our first workshop in 1983. Like all
artists, I'm influenced by everything - places I visit, things I
see on TV or in books, the work of other artists. Your life has
been filled with an abundance of amazing achievements; published
artist and author, artwork appearing on numerous magazine covers,
first non-North American president of the International Association
of Astronomical Artists (IAAA), working in a vast cross-spectrum of
the entertainment field, socializing with some of the most
brilliant minds of the past century - the list goes on and on.
Yet, there is one accomplishment that stands out among the rest
- in 2003, the Minor Planet (13329), which was discovered in 1998
by Spacewatch and previously designated as 1998 SB32, was renamed
Davidhardy. Can you please let our readers know the back-story of
how this came about? I can't really tell you very much! -
nobody was more surprised than myself when I received an e-mail
from Dr. James Scotti of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory
in Tucson to tell me about this. It seems that he felt it was time
for some artists to receive this honour, which naturally normally
goes to astronomers and scientists (Patrick Moore 'got' his some
years ago), so, he recommended me, and a few others. I can only say
(as I did to James) that I was gobsmacked! Do you have any
parting words of wisdom, or inside secrets to success in the field
of art or writing, that you would be so kind as to share with the
Renderosity art community? Thank you so much for sharing your time
and talent with our readers. The Web is a wonderful vehicle.
When I started out, I was desperate to find ways to show my work to
others, and the only way was to get it published, whether in books
or magazines. That was about it! If the artists reading this are
already members of Renderosity, then they already know how
to share their work and receive the comments of others. If you're
passionate about something, just DO it. One of the biggest problems
is procrastination: many people say "Oh, I'd love to do this. . ."
and never do. But make sure that what you show others really is the
best you can do; the downside of the web is that people can put up
masses of stuff, which may not really be up to scratch. This may
even be why digital art has a bad name in some circles, because
people don't necessarily see the best of it online. It's a bit
ironic that to do that, they need to buy a book!
To learn more about David A. Hardy, and to view
additional images of his artwork, please visit David A. Hardy's AstroArt
web site.
 
Also available: Futures: 50 Years in Space, The Challenge of the
Stars A collaboration between David A. Hardy and Sir
Patrick Moore. Hardyware
A showcase of David A. Hardy and his images, from the early years
to present day. Aurora: A Child of Two Worlds, David A. Hardy's
science-fiction novel.
We invite you to visit David on Renderosity.
All images within this article are copyright and used
with special permisson from David A. Hardy. Any use of these images
without written permission from the artist is
prohibited.
 "Lets Talk" with Dee-Marie
is a monthly featured column
by Dee-Marie:
Senior Staff Writer, and Managing Editor of
Renderosity's Front Page News January, 27,
2005 |
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