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This is my new oil-on-canvas painting, showing a colorful and I think spectacularly beautiful scene of a spherical spaceship deeply ensconced within a red nebula opening up a wormhole to a brighter region of space dominated by dense star clusters and green nebular streams.
The ship is one and the same with the vessel featured in my next novel “Warp Dawn”, the Mjölnir. A strip near the equator harbors the land and waters inside the space habitat, which is the area of purplish color, the color chosen by its builder, Perun of Atlas, after the violet eyes of his beloved wife, Emma of Atlas.
The symbols on the hull painted in white are the Mjölnir, Thor’s hammer, in this culture also associated with the Slavic god Perun (Perun of Atlas’s namesake), and a circular symbol associated in this culture with Lada, the goddess of beauty and fertility.
The black portion is in shadow, because it’s a window granting the passengers of the ship expansive views of the outside world through both poles; being in interstellar space there isn’t much in the way of illumination, except the floodlights that light up the hull allowing us to see it.
Viewed from the strip of land inside the ship looking down the land’s long axis, ahead and behind the horizon curves upward and meets at the zenith directly above. Directly to the left and to the right are the poles, which the outside view rotate around.
The way the ship is aligned now ahead through the front pole is a view of the wormhole, filling most of the sky, its center right at the pole, the rest of the sphere appearing to rotate around its center.
The wormhole itself appears as a spherical bubble in space, gravitational-lensing-like effects distorting the stars and nebulae toward the edge of the sphere. The portal opened up by the starship’s drive system could connect two points in space at any distance, maybe even billions of light-years.
This painting could easily depict a scene right from my next novel, “Warp Dawn”, and indeed is currently my leading candidate to be the cover image for the book when I release it. I adore the spacey nature of it, the color contrasts, the beautiful nebular filaments, and how it depicts both ship and wormhole.
At first I thought that my previous painting, “Starburst”, would serve as the cover image for “Warp Dawn” but I was honestly a bit disappointed with how that one turned out, even if it was pretty. This one, on the other hand, blew away my expectations! It’s definitely the favorite out of all the works of art I’ve made so far.
As part of my “at least one piece of visual art a month” goal for 2021, this is my (first) piece for March 2021, and my first since February’s piece (“Starburst”) about a month ago.
Art prints, laptop skins, phone cases, pouches, travel mugs, and more bearing the image of “Starburst” are available at my Redbubble shop. I hope you enjoy my painting!
