THE ART OF EXOPLANETS
Michael Carroll made his first painting of the Moon when he was 13, right after the Apollo 8 astronauts sent back photographs of the lunar surface. From that moment on, he was constantly imagining what the landscapes of other planets might look like. His aerospace engineer dad encouraged him to paint, his mom read him fictional stories about starships, and gradually Mike learned to blend these two lenses on the universe – science and art – into his own unique space art.
In this film, Mike shares stories about developing his creative practice informed by scientific understandings of space, and how he became interested in making landscape paintings of exoplanets (planets around other suns) that have real features from Earth’s own surface embedded within them. Along the way, Mike takes us on a gentle, meditative journey to consider what makes our own planet unique in the age of exoplanets.
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This film can be screened on its own or with its companion film Earth and the Exoplanets.
"We first discovered and fell in love with Mike’s space art in his book Envisioning Exoplanets, which is filled with exoplanet landscapes carefully imagined to balance scientific and artistic ways of understanding these extremely distant places. He describes in our film how paying attention to exoplanets through his art has made him see Earth as ever more precious – for in all the different planetary architectures and types of new worlds we’re seeing, there’s no place like our planet. It feels to us like a welcome philosophical pause to listen to him express how he gazes outwards in order to see our own planet with fresh eyes."
- Ceridwen Dovey, Writer & Space Environmentalist