Steve Cox, Anna Jacobson, Tara Mokhtari, Anne Casey
Stephen J. Williams
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Tag Archives: Drawing
Ron Miller
After graduating from art college (I have a BFA in Illustration), I worked for several commercial art studios doing illustrations for advertising.
I had always been a fan—for literally as long as I can remember—of both science fiction and astronomy so in my spare time I enjoyed creating realistic scenes set on other worlds. Much of my inspiration for doing this came from my admiration for Chesley Bonestell.
Learning that the new National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC was going to have a planetarium, I wrote to the director, asking if they had any plans to have a staff artist. No, he replied, but it sounded like a good idea. My wife and I soon found ourselves on our way to the nation’s capital.
I worked for NASM for four years before leaving to become a freelance illustrator … which is what I have done for the past 40+ years. I had my first book published shortly after leaving the museum—Space Art: a history of space painting—and my 60th book will be appearing this winter. It’s a lot of fun working on one’s own books: you not only get to write it you get to illustrate it, too. Admittedly, this hasn’t been universally true: several of my books have few if any illustrations by me. For instance, my biography of artist Chesley Bonestell or my histories of space travel and spacecraft. I have also written several novels … and even created a comic book series.
I have also created postage stamps (one of which is attached to the New Horizons spacecraft, now deep in the Kuiper Belt), and have contributed production art to several motion pictures, such as David Lynch’s Dune.
About 80 or 90 percent of what I do today is in the realm of scientific illustration … primarily space and astronomy-related art. Some of the clients I work for regularly are Astronomy Magazine and Scientific American. But I also do a lot of book covers, which is something I especially enjoy doing…if for no other reason than that they make a really nice change of pace after doing planets all day.
While all of my space art had been originally created using traditional media—acrylics on illustration board—I made the switch to painting digitally almost 20 years ago … largely because it was easier meeting my deadlines. However, I still do space art in real paint and with real brushes just for my own satisfaction.
The goal of all my space art is to convey the reality of other worlds … that they are just as real and substantial and beautiful as our own planet. I want people who see my art to believe that they are seeing places that they might very well be able to visit themselves.
Photo: Ron Miller, with his Hugo Award from World Science Fiction Society.
Sebastian Steensen
Sebastian Steensen is a Melbourne-based artist who has worked for over 20 years in the areas of painting, drawing and, occasionally, printmaking and photography.
After tertiary studies in Fine Arts, and a stint as an art teacher in China, I’ve staged a few one-person exhibitions, and been included in group exhibitions.
My work is strongly figurative, and it follows the tradition of western narrative painting. I believe it is informed by my drawing ability. But, technically, I always wish to combine this with painterly aspects, by which I hope to move the imagery beyond illustrational ‘recording,’ into more robust psychological territory.
Sebastian Steensen
Steve Cox
Steve Cox is an artist and writer. He has a forty-year exhibition history and his work is held in major public and private collections throughout Australia and internationally. As an arts writer, since 2000, he has contributed articles and reviews, and has conducted interviews with artists, for numerous newspapers, journals and magazines, including The Guardian; VAULT: Australasian Art & Culture; Gay Times, UK; FilmInk.com, amongst others. Cox writes on a range of subjects, including contemporary and historical art; LGBTQI issues; social issues; cinema; contemporary music.
Between 2013–2014, he was the London Arts Editor of NakedButSafe magazine. In 2019 he was on the judging panel for the Young Arts Journalist Award (YAJA). Also in 2019, he was the inaugural Writer in Residence for Brunswick Street Village, an innovative building complex, which espouses green values and arts in the community as a primary concern. During the residency, he produced a collection of fifty poems, on a range of subjects.
Alex Skovron
Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and emigrated to Australia in 1958, aged nearly ten. His family settled in Sydney, where he grew up and completed his studies. From the early 1970s he worked as an editor for book publishers in Sydney and (after 1980) Melbourne; since the 1990s he has worked as a freelance editor. His poetry has appeared widely in Australia and overseas. The Rearrangement (1988), his first book, won the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards and was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Awards; there followed Sleeve Notes (1992), Infinite City: 100 Sonnetinas (1999, shortlisted in the Age Book of the Year and Victorian Premier’s Awards), The Man and the Map (2003), Autographs: 56 poems in prose (2008), and Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014, shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards). Other awards have included the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry, the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award, and the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize. The numerous public readings he has given include appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland, Macedonia, Portugal, and on Norfolk Island. An 80-minute CD in which he reads from his poetry was published in 2019 under the title Towards the Equator. His next collection, Letters from the Periphery, is due in 2021.
Concurrently with his poetry, Alex has intermittently published in prose, including short stories, a novella, and the abovementioned Autographs, which can be read as a book of microstories. The novella, titled The Poet (2005), was joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for a work of fiction and has been translated into Czech. The Attic, a bilingual selection of his poems translated into French, was published by PEN Melbourne in 2013; and Water Music, a bilingual volume of Chinese translations in the Flying Island series (Macau), came out in 2017. Some of his poetry has also been translated into Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Macedonian and German. His collection of short stories, The Man who Took to his Bed, was published in 2017, and a Czech-language edition appeared in 2019. He has collaborated with his Czech translator, Josef Tomáš, on English translations of the twentieth-century Czech poets Jiří Orten and Vladimír Holan.
Concerns that have driven Alex Skovron’s poetry and fiction are many and various: history, language and music; the riddles of time and the allure of memory; philosophy, faith and the quest for self-knowledge; art and the creative impulse; fantasy, eros and the affections. His interest in speculative fiction has played a recurring role in his thinking and his work, as has a lifelong passion for music. As a poet, he enjoys both the disciplines and the aesthetics of formal design and the diverse challenges of freer structures. Integral to his project has been a focus on musicality and the primacy of rhythm. He likes probing the elasticities of syntax, and exploiting the ‘contrapuntal’ layerings available to imagery and meaning via compression, connotation, ambiguity.
Photo: Martin Langford
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