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| Spaceship Earth, acrylic on canvas © Olivier Hijmans 2015 |
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What do we have here? Floating above the Earth.. some unidentified entity, emerging from or approaching the blue surface? Or lines and structures launched from the moon in all directions? An unseen connection between our home and outer space? Humanity reaching for the stars? The scope of this scene is simply as wide or narrow as the World view one projects onto it.
The idea of Earth as a spaceship is a tantalizing one. In the words of
Buckminster Fuller: "
I’ve often heard people say: ‘I wonder what it would feel like to
be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it
feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts on
a little spaceship called Earth." What's more, he even wrote an
operating manual for it!
I've painted this in
2015, hoping it will trigger some cosmic perspective in the beholder. What is this little blue home in the vast blackness? What is our responsibility for it? Can we treasure it? Will we able to reach out as one united civilization and contact our cosmic neighbors..?
