|
Click here for Next Section |
A Country Rag|
By karol cooper
"Last week, 45 years later, Ross, now a top-ranked artist and known professionally as Alexander Ross, put the finishing touches on his version of the new space telescope scheduled to be sent into orbit by NASA in 1985. "The painting, commissioned by The Perkin-Elmer Corp. of Norwalk, Connecticut, is dedicated to the scientific community — 'to man and the wonders he creates through his will and intellect.' Ross calls it The Search for Origin."
Graphic: The Search for Origin, by Alexander Ross |
Betty Tyler|
To Alexander Ross, being approached by The Perkin-Elmer Corporation to create a
painting of a space telescope presented a paradox. In his personal archives he wrote in
the margin of one press release about this project, "A little out of my line but an exciting
project." Ross was not given to hard-and-dry rules of painting, nor did he follow those
rules in his presentation of his subjects. Ross' career took off in the 1940s when he gave Norman Rockwell a run for his money as the cover illustrator for Good Housekeeping magazine for twelve years. With the advent of photography Ross saw the proverbial writing on the wall and developed a vocation as a fine-arts painter, and had 17 one-man shows during a single year in the late 70s. Focusing on masterfully colorful dreamlike images of flowers, ethereal people and otherworldly animals, Ross painted subjects as he imagined they would appear in Paradise. So how, as an artist who romanticized all of life, would he approach a mission like this one? "I've been up and down on this project emotionally," said Ross, "I didn't want to paint a bunch of hardware floating around in a blue void. But I wondered how I could tell hard-boiled scientists my version of it in a romantic way." The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was the first and flagship mission of NASA's Great Observatories program. Designed to complement the wavelength capabilities of the other spacecraft in the, HST telescope capable of performing observations in the visible, near-ultraviolet, and near-infrared.
|
Placed into a low-earth orbit by the space shuttle, HST was designed to be modular so
that on subsequent shuttle missions it could be recovered, have faulty or obsolete parts
replaced with new and/or improved instruments, and be re-released. The mission was
troubled soon after launch by the discovery that the primary mirror was spherically
aberrated. Steps were taken to correct these problems, including replacement of the Wide
Field and Planetary Camera with a second-generation version with built-in corrective
optics (a giant contact lens). Information from the Space Telescope Science Institute web
site can be accessed at . Ross' painting, The Search for Origin, is a magnificent six-by-nine foot mural, replete with brilliant colors and painterly Renoir-like aspects. He depicts the scientific community as one single man, surrounded by all the trappings of telescope hardware. The man is slightly transparent, with his feet firmly planted on the earth and his head in the stars. Like the man, the scope hardware is translucent, and behind it is the display of the universe ~ beautiful gaseous nebula, an array of white fiery stars, the whole mystery of outer space. Ross' carefully thought out representation of an emotionless piece of floating hardware is masterly. Said Ross about the piece: "Man has lifted himself from the face of the earth and its clouded pollution-laden atmosphere into celestial space in his continuing quest to solve the mystery of creation."
|
Graphic: Author and musician Alan Ross, son of Alexander; photo courtesy Steve Cook and Music on the Square
|
text&photo c. karol kooper, graphics c. Jeannette Harris; January 2001. All rights reserved.
|
Click here for Next Section (By Faith Alone) |