Possibilities Without Limits
by Vincent Di Fate
They have called him the dean of American space artists and the world's greatest painter of futuristic subjects--and all with good reason. As a postwar baby boomer with stars in my eyes, the brightest stars gleamed not in the night sky, but in the paintings of Bob McCall, for there among the cold and distant worlds of space were the footprints of human beings. There in the frozen sands of a million far away moonlets, men and women worked side by side, lived their lives, experienced the adventure of discovery, died valiantly in a future yet to unfold. Of all the artists labeled with the distinction of visionary, few are truly so. Robert T. McCall is one; a visionary painter in the pure and literal sense.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, McCall went to the Columbia College of Art and Design and later attended the Art Institute of Chicago. Service in the U.S. Army Air Corps stimulated a lifelong interest in aviation and eventually led to a career of painting aerospace subjects. A commission from Life Magazine in the 1950s to depict the future of space flight drew the attention of James E. Webb, NASA's chief administrator from 1961 to 1968. Webb formulated the NASA art program with the idea of commissioning major American artists to pictorially document the agency's various efforts in space development. McCall was among the first to be called upon in those pre-Mercury days when space travel was little more than a seemingly unattainable dream. It marked the beginning of a shared national aspiration; a vision of outward expansion we saw through his eyes more than anyone else's. Intuitively, he knew the scope and shape of the human future.
Catapulted to international celebrity his work on Stanley Kubrick's epic science fiction movie, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, McCall has since contributed to such films STAR TREK-The Motion Picture, METEOR, and Disney's THE BLACK HOLE. His impressive resume of commissioned work includes a large number of space related stamp designs for the U.S. Postal Service, pre-production illustrations for the film industry and several large and elaborate murals for the National Air and Space Museum (Smithsonian Institution) in Washington, D.C., The Johnson Space Center in Texas, the Dryden Flight Research Facility in California, the Disney EPCOT Center in Florida and others. These are the kinds of assignments that most artists can only dream about.
Add to that Bob McCall's induction into the Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1988, and you have a hero truly worthy of emulation. McCall has gone there to the vast, dark reaches armed with only his paint brush and his wits and come back whole and healthy with the biggest game of all--a vision of a future in which human beings are true citizens of the universe and where the possibilities are without limits.
---Vincent Di Fate