As long as the future is ahead of us, it remains a dream. Before it becomes our present, the future is a fantasy, a place where we store our subconscious desires, preconceptions, and anxieties.
One man who has managed to earn his keep with specific dreams about the future is British artist John Harris. In his paintings, Harris depicts enormous spacecraft flying over rusted towers and people congregating to watch world-shattering events. He shows us landscapes that don’t exist and events that will never come to pass. But his skill comes in bringing to life his dreams, making them something we can all share in and admire.
“My point of view is that imagination is the breeding ground of reality,” said Harris, whose work will appear in a new compilation Beyond the Horizon, out May 27.
He cites the example of Arthur C. Clarke daydreaming about geostationary satellites while working as a radar technician during World War II. Though Clarke didn’t invent the idea for such satellites, he was the one who realized their importance as communication relays and popularized them through technical papers and popular fiction. These imaginative thoughts were translated into some of the real-life technologies that underpin our modern world. In this way, Harris sees dreams as an important force shaping the way the future plays out.
You might not be familiar with Harris by name, but if you’ve read science fiction books in the last few decades, you’ve probably run into his art. His work has appeared on countless book covers, perhaps most famously on the first edition of Orson Scott Card’s classic Ender’s Game. (Though the painting was actually created for an unrelated book by Frederick Pohl called Drunkard’s Walk.) He has also done commissioned work for NASA’s art program as well as more conventional fine art paintings.
Dreams have always been an important component of Harris’ abilities. He recalls that one of his earliest forays into art came from a fairly commonplace childhood event: He spent a day sick in bed and began marking up the white wall next to him with dirty fingers.
“I was incredibly struck by the sense of space and depth that I could get from making smudges on a wall,” he said. “And I found that I could dream myself into those spaces.”
This skill of taking the barest suggestion of shape and form and creating perspective and figures is evident in his work today. He starts many of his paintings by applying marks and lines of paint, charcoal, or pastel to a toned surface. These initial lines will divide the space up into different regions, creating the feeling of three dimensions.
“I start with an abstraction and I let the feelings coalesce into form,” said Harris. “And because I’m thinking in the context of science and science fiction, the forms that I find on the canvas end up relating to those ideas.”
This perhaps explains the ethereal quality of Harris’ pieces, and the way they seem to elicit that mixture of awe and melancholy that can sometimes be felt after waking from a particularly potent dream. It often seems like an event of enormous importance has just occurred in his paintings, though the exact nature of the reckoning is unclear and intangible.
One of Harris’ best known pieces came from when he was invited by NASA to see an early morning shuttle launch in 1985. Harris remembers trying to photograph the moment of liftoff with his camera. But rather than capture the feeling of excitement, he felt that the lens introduced an unwanted separation between him and the event. It wasn’t until the shuttle took off that he put the camera down and looked at the light and color produced by the launch’s vapor exhaust.
“With the sun shining through this great pall of cloud, the whole place was covered in a tangerine glow,” said Harris. “It was absolutely intense, and an extraordinary experience that can’t get captured by film.”
Harris produced a painting of the shuttle’s dark gantry sitting in this intense light after launch and titled the work “Aftermath, T + 60” (the 5th slide in the gallery above). When Harris sent the painting to NASA, it got stuck at U.S. customs for a while and didn’t arrive at the agency until January 1986. In one of those strange accidents of history, the day it appeared in the office of NASA’s then art program director, Robert Schulman, was the same day that the space shuttle Challenger catastrophically disintegrated, killing its crew.
“Schulman was reeling in shock from this horrendous incident,” said Harris. “And he got back to Washington, and there was this crate waiting for him. So here was this very funereal painting, called ‘Aftermath, T + 60,’ and he was a bit freaked out by it.” The piece now hangs in the Smithsonian Museum.
About a year after this work, Harris began producing more paintings for NASA in a series of unconventional pieces called the “Secret History of the Earth.” The works are based on the agency’s Earth observing images from the 1960s and ‘70s but what they depict is wholly imaginary; merely invoking the flavor of what Harris sees when he looks at satellite photography.
“I’ve described them as being like tone poems of the Earth,” he said.
In addition to the works seen in the gallery above, you can watch a short documentary about Harris’ process for these paintings below.
