The sun shafts down on a group of cocktail drinkers, as a woman in a white dress laughs at something her camel-coated companion has said and a bartender stands at ease, wearing a faint smile. Behind the revelers, a rolling landscape of red roofs recedes uncannily toward a glowing ring of sky. Above, freed from gravity’s clutch, a man on a bicycle rigged with orange sails glides across the crescent horizon.
Stumble across the paintings of Rick Guidice and Don Davis in some dark corner of the Internet one evening, and you might think they are pages from an old pulp magazine. They were in fact commissioned by NASA forty years ago to accompany scientific reports, fleshing out what seemed, at the time, a plausible future of colonies in Earth’s orbit.
Rick Guidice was a freelance illustrator who often worked on advertisements. "We all aspired to get General Motors as a client and do these wonderful ads and publish them in the top magazines every week," he recalled recently, reached at his studio in Los Gatos, California. He painted machinery, cars, buildings—in his down time, he painted a Formula 1 race in Monaco.
Don Davis’s experience was in more otherworldly scenes. In 1968, a high schooler entranced by space, he was referred to a job program at the US Geological Survey’s Branch of Astrogeological Studies. "They were involved with background work for the Apollo program, helping map the moon and decide where the landing should take place," he says. He showed up with an oil painting of the Moon and was hired on the spot as a scientific illustrator.
