![]() ![]() Saturn as Seen from Mimas – 1944 Chesley Bonestell paintings courtesy of Bonestell LLC From there, Bonestell traveled to Hollywood, a letter of introduction from Van Alen in hand, to pursue a career in motion pictures. Bonestell’s beautiful renderings delighted both the city fathers and the public, and helped the bridge get built. (The gargoyles at the top were a Bonestell touch.) When the Depression hit, Bonestell moved back to California and was hired by Joseph Strauss to illustrate the designs of the Golden Gate Bridge. Upon his return to the United States in the late 1920s, he joined architect William Van Alen to help design the Chrysler Building. When the Great Depression affected his ability to get work in the architectural field, Bonestell and his second wife, opera singer Ruby Helder, traveled to England, where Bonestell worked for the Illustrated London News. “The combination of architectural and artistic skills was a melding of the divine gifts he was blessed with. “Everything that Bonestell did can be traced back to his architectural background,” says Stewart, who spent three and a half years making Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future. He also was involved in the design of Filoli, the huge California estate featured in the TV series Dynasty. Supreme Court Building, the New York Central Building (now known as the Helmsley Building), and several state capitols. This ability would come in handy years later when he worked with Ley and von Braun in designing realistic space ships, space stations, and other futuristic hardware.Ī Domed Colony on Mars – 1976 Chesley Bonestell paintings courtesy of Bonestell LLCĪn Instrument-Carrying Satellite in its Orbit, Passing 200 Miles Above the Atlantic Coast – 1953 Chesley Bonestell paintings courtesy of Bonestell LLCīonestell’s architectural work often comes as a surprise to those who know him exclusively as an astronomical artist, but his fingerprints are on a great number of important buildings, including the Chrysler Building in New York, the U.S. ![]() One of Bonestell’s greatest talents was combining his artistic ability with a deep understanding of architectural design to create renderings that helped lay people easily comprehend even the most complex of structures. ![]() He worked for a variety of architectural firms, and was closely associated with Willis Polk, who helped rebuild San Francisco following the 1906 quake. That experience, as several experts in the documentary attest, found a permanent place in Bonestell’s psyche and much of his art in the decades that followed.Īt the urging of his family, Bonestell attended Columbia University with the intent of becoming an architect, but left the school in his third year. ![]() “He had a remarkable way of peering forward in time and putting what he saw down on canvas.”īonestell was born in San Francisco in 1888, and as a teenager survived the 1906 earthquake that leveled the city. “Chesley Bonestell was the future, and still is the future,” observes Douglass Stewart, who wrote, produced and directed Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future. However, a new documentary titled Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future aims to introduce Bonestell to contemporary audiences and remind the world of his remarkable accomplishments, which include helping get the Golden Gate Bridge built, creating matte paintings for numerous Hollywood blockbusters, promoting America’s nascent space program, and more. Years later, Bonestell would work closely with early space pioneers such as Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun in helping the world understand what exists beyond our tiny planet, why it is essential for us to go there, and how it could be done.Ī titan in his time, Chesley Bonestell is little remembered today except by hardcore science fiction fans and those scientists whose dreams of exploring the cosmos were first inspired by Bonestell’s astonishingly accurate representations. Created by a visionary artist named Chesley Bonestell, the paintings showed war-weary readers what worlds beyond our own might actually look like–a stunning achievement for the time. In 1944, Life Magazine published a series of paintings depicting Saturn as seen from its various moons. ![]()
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