Our search to expand our cosmic horizons is symbolized in this recent work depicting a far-future starship moving out of a dark nebular cloud into a glowing region of light. "Man's future lies along the space frontier," says McCall. "I search constantly for ways to convey my feelings of awe, my love for the whole subject."

The realms we discover in our explorations of the cosmos will be filled with scenes of stunning beauty and awesome power. This impressionistic starscape depicts a comet streaking toward a rift in the fabric of space beyond a cracked and desolate alien world.

In the fullness of time; the human race will make its way out of our own solar system and cross the vast ocean of night that separates us from other worlds. What we will find there will be stranger and more wonderful than anything we con imagine.

The distances of interstellar space are vast beyond imagining. To cross them will require either generations of pioneers willing to live out the span of their lives in miniature worlds in space, or new discoveries that will allow us to bend space and time to our will. But the day will one day come when we meet other intelligent beings for the first time.

Here, a colossal interplanetary craft is suspended over a distant world. The city in the foreground may have been built by our descendants, or we may be the star voyagers who are encountering 1-1 new race for the first time. When that encounter comes at last, it will be the most profound event in all of human history.

Probability and the universal laws of biology and physics suggest that life exists throughout the universe. This concept drawing for Star Trek: The Motion Picture depicts a bizarre alien "creature," part machine and part organism, moving through the vast depths of space.

If there are other life-forms elsewhere in space, they may be explorers like ourselves, driven to learn more about the universe on voyages of discovery. Here titanic alien starships dock at a transportation facility after journeying far across the galaxies. Starships was created as a concept painting for a proposed remake of War of the Worlds that was never filmed.

McCall's assemblies of ancient and modern artifacts have a haunting, dreamlike power. This painting depicts a free-floating monument of the far future in a pristine garden, touched with archaic design elements such as the winged figure.

The end of all exploring is to return home with insights gained from our travels. Here golden beings of light descend from a pyramid-like structure that has appeared over a quiet harbor. To Robert McCall, the image represents a benevolent race that has come to live among us. "Maybe in the future we will be living on Earth with new inhabitants among us," says McCall, "intelligent beings who have discovered us and chosen to live among us peacefully."

Here McCall acknowledges the classical tradition of proportion, symmetry, and pure geometric form that informs his own work, and the work of great designers and artists throughout history. Dedicated to the Venetian painter Canaletto, the painting combines buildings from St. Mark's Square in Venice and free-form futuristic artifacts, adding desert cactus in the foreground as an imaginative touch.

Many of Robert McCall's most powerful images are combined in this symbolic painting which offers an idealized vision of technological achievement, creating a peaceful, harmonious future out of the wisdom and experience of the past.

The far future will hold many mysteries and wonders, beyond our current ability to comprehend. Here a space-suited figure bathes in a field of energy in a canyon reminiscent of the southwestern desert--or Mars.

The wisdom that we gain from our cosmic journey will lead us to a new appreciation of the riches of our own world, In this radiantly optimistic painting, all of human experience is contained within a single moment, a seamless blending of past, present, and future. "I am as intrigued with the past as I am with the future," says McCall. "Who knows? Maybe it's all happening simultaneously in some cosmic way we don't yet understand."

The human longing to rise above the world, whether it is expressed in spaceflight or in the desire to leave the cares and troubles of the world behind for a time, is part of a deeper spiritual need for freedom and transcendence. In Ascension, McCall uses the figure of the astronaut suspended in space, a recurring image in his work, to represent this fundamental need of the human spirit.

In this dreamlike vision of a starship glimpsed through the pillars of an ancient temple, the past and future are united in a single timeless moment symbolizing humanity's unceasing search for wisdom, wonder, and truth.

One of McCall's most ambitious endeavors was a design for a set of stained glass windows for the Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona, which he executed with his wife, Louise. These color sketches for the windows convey an exuberant sense of celebration and hope, and express the infinite power and majesty of the cosmos.

By the end of the next century, space colonies with thousands of inhabitants - giant cities in space with their own histories and cultures-may be in place high above the Earth. This visionary scene shows an astronaut in an environment suit streaking up from a launching bay on a massive orbiting colony. In the background, small transfer vehicles travel between the station and great spherical exploration craft.

For the Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona, Robert McCall was asked to paint a mural for the practice room of the church choir. Combining secular and religious symbols, the earthly and the cosmic, the mural expresses vividly the call to "make a joyful noise."