Hasta La Ideas

Some sad news to return to after the weekend. It’s been announced that artist Robert McCall passed away late this past week in a hospital near his home in Arizona. If you’re not outer-space inclined, his name might not immediately ring any bells, but even so, you’d be familiar with his work on such projects as the poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey or his murals at the Smithsonian‘s Air and Space Museum, which are just two of his endlessly impressive paintings and illustrations that captured his fascination with the science of space (even if that science was often of the fictional variety). As a personal aside, in the late 80s, this writer, whose father was friends with the artist, spent countless hours watching McCall paint the mural Icarus Triumphant: The Legend Retold at the Glendale Public Library‘s main branch and still has fond memories of meeting and talking with him as he took time out to talk to we gawking children. Here’s a great line from McCall’s obituary:

“There are other space artists,” Scobee Rogers said. “But he had a vision for the future. Many of the artists paint what is out there. But he had a vision of what the future could be. He was a man ahead of his time.”

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