WILLIAM K. HARTMANN:   FROM EARTH'S LANDSCAPES TO SPACE ART
William Hartmann is an American artist of Swiss descent. He is known primarily for his astronomical paintings, which have been exhibited and published internationally. Exhibits include the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and exhibits in Montreux, Moscow and Yalta. Publications include books by Hartmann himself, Carl Sagan, and others, plus covers on the Economist, Natural History Magazine, and others.   Hartmann is also an astronomer. In 1997 he was named first winner of the Carl Sagan Medal of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), for public communication of planetary science. Asteroid number 3341 is named for him in recognition of his research on asteroids and the origin of the moon.   William Hartmann follows in the tradition of his grandfather, a Swiss landscape painter. Hartmann has done landscapes in various regions, including this acrylic plein air view, painted just below the summit of Mt. Palomar, showing the domes of the famous observatory in southern California.	His Grandfather, Andreas Hartmann, was born in Bretz (Castels), Switzerland in 1868. He grew up in Buchen, worked in Davos, and emigrated to the US in 1892. He produced a large number of oils and watercolors of US landscapes. One of his watercolors of a Swiss scene (probably done from a photo ca. 1930) is shown above.
Hartmann's astronomical paintings cover a wide variety of themes and are known for their realism and technical accuracy. They form a unique record of our conceptions of various locales in the universe. The view above shows the surface of an airless planet in a star-forming region of the galaxy, such as the Orion nebula and star cluster. In such young clusters, stars frequently explode as supernovae, and one such explosion is shown here in the distant sky. The foreground was painted from nature in Hawaii at the Volcanoes National Park.	PAINTINGS AVAILABLE FOR PUBLICATION OR PURCHASE   Hartmann's paintings are for sale from the artist at: 2224 E. 4th St. Tucson, AZ 85719, USA.   Hartmann maintains a slide file of paintings available for publication on short notice.   He can be contacted by email at hartmann@psi.edu, or inquire through his secretary at psikey@psi.edu.   More examples of Hartmann's work can be seen in his Homepage at the Planetary Science Institute website.   A fraction of the proceeds of Hartmann's astronomical paintings is donated to graduate student travel fund of the AAS and to support research on solar system evolution at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. International Association for the Astronomical Arts
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