Space Artists Honored
Davis has painted everything from interiors of giant space colonies to imaginary planets to a total eclipse of the Sun using oil, airbrush, digital, and other media. His art and animations appeared in Cosmos, Carl Sagan’s 1980 television series popularizing astronomy. "The greatest project I undertook for the show was the crafting of a 3-foot diameter Earth globe," says Davis in his online biography. "It was like painting a 4 by 8 foot extremely accurate pictorial map including surface relief using acrylic gel medium." Davis was later awarded an Emmy for his contributions. His work has also appeared in Parade, Saturday Review, and Sagan’s books Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot, and the cover of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dragons of Eden.
Creator of museum displays, Emmy-winning chief artist for Cosmos, and director of space-science documentaries are some of the positions space artist Lomberg has held in his career. He created the two-minute outward zoom from Earth in the beginning of the film Contact and painted a mural of the Milky Way galaxy that hung for 10 years at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Lomberg was also the design director for NASA’s Voyager interstellar record, and his artwork appears in the textbook, The Search for Life in the Universe.
Michael Carroll, who like Davis and Lomberg was a founding member of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA), is enthusiastic about the ASP’s decision. "Don and Jon were active in the space-art community when only a handful of people were participating. Jon’s role in Cosmos gave vision and direction to the community, and Don lent an eloquent scientific approach to his art that was unmatched up to that time."
