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Bonestell Gallery<br>Chesley Bonestell an American pioneer of Space Art

Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986), an American pioneer of space art helped popularize manned space travel.

Content is from the site's 2001 archived pages and other outside sources.

The current website for Chesley Bonestell is found at: http://www.bonestell.org/

Bonestell LLC holds copyright to a majority of Chesley Bonestell's artwork. They license these images for use in a variety of mediums – from film to print publications and exhibition.

Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future

An official selection for the 2018 Newport Beach Film Festival!

A Brief Biography of Chesley Bonestell

Written by Frederick C. Durant, III (15 February, 1983)

for The Seibu Museum of Art

Bonestell/Iwasaki Exhibition

Tokyo, Japan | April to September 1983

Chesley Bonestell was born 1 January, 1888. He has had three successful careers in art; the best is the one he commenced in 1944, as an artist/illustrator of space flight and astronomical subjects.

At the age of 95, he still paints daily.

Bonestell was born in San Francisco, California. He studied architecture and worked on major structures, including the Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco) and the Chrysler Tower (New York).

In 1938, at the age of 50, he began a second career as a motion picture special effects artist. Within a few years his unique skill in creating realistic scenes made him the most sought-after matte artist in Hollywood.

Working on such pictures as War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide, and Destination Moon, Bonestell refined his space painting techniques. He says: "As my knowledge of the technical side of the motion picture industry broadened, I realized I could apply camera angles as used in the motion pictures studio and illustrate 'travel' from satellite to satellite, showing Saturn exactly as it would look".

Nearly forty years ago he entered his best known career; illustrating astronomical scenes and space flight. During the next decade he created some of his most compelling works: illustrations of manned visits to the Moon and planets. This was a decade before there were national programs for large rockets and satellite flight. It was a time when space flight was the dream of a few enthusiasts, certainly before the subject was professionally acceptable - or even respectable.

Bonestell's ground breaking space illustrations appeared in major publications including: Life, Scientific American, and Astounding Science Fiction. He began collaborating with Willy Ley, a founding member of the German Space Travel Society and the author of the classic Rockets, Missiles and Men in Space. Ley and Bonestell produced The Conquest of Space (1949) and Beyond the Solar System (1964). Teaming up with Wernher von Braun and others, they brought out Conquest of the Moon (1953). and Arthur C. Clarke and Bonestell toured the planets in Beyond Jupiter (1972).

Chesley Bonestell's deep intereset in, and knowledge of, astronomy served him well in his depictions of our Solar System. His training in architecture enabled him to render accurate perspective and visual angles.

As an aid to determining the complex perspective of spacecraft in some of his paintings, he made models by drawing scaled pen-and-ink sections on transparent acetate. These right-angle sections were glued together and photographed at whatever angles seemed best. Enlargements were made, traced, and transferred to illustration board in preparation for painting.

In the early 1950s Collier's magazine asked him to illustrate a technical series of articles, to be written by Wernher von Braun, astronomer Fred Whipple, and others. During the next few years, Bonestell illustrated several more major articles for Collier's on themes such as space stations, the training of astronauts, and a manned expedition to Mars.

These articles acted as a catalyst, encouraging discussion and debate among engineers and scientists. Was space flight feasible, or was it just a romantic adventurous dream? Were there economic benefits to be gained? Was it worth the money? While theorists argued about the possibility of rockets and spacecraft traveling to the Moon and planets, Bonestell showed what it would look like when we got there!

Chesley Bonestell died on June 11, 1986 at the age of 98 at his home in Carmel, California.

Thank you to Melvin Schuetz for his new Bonestell Web Site

"My dad was a huge fan of Chesley Bonestell's work - especially his planetary art, which my dad referenced in many of his own work. He was kind of a superhero to us, not unsimilar to Batman due to his persistence and dedication to his art. Recently, as part of an internet marketing campaign, my dad was promoting the original Batman hoodies online and tried to get Chesley's estate to approve the use of an image where the artist was wearing one of these cool hoodies. Although they were flattered, they turned him down, but sent us some...