The eye of the sky is a stylized interpretation of Messier 64 also commonly referred to as the black eye galaxy and is one of the first clear examples of my artistic style as compared to real life and other artistic interpretations. The eye of the sky was my first attempt at creating space art directly from a reference photo sourced from Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope. Ultimately this work lead me slowly towards discovering my exact artistic style  of “visionary Realism” that I continue to evolve to this day.

In the Reference photo to the left you will likely notice some sharp differences between my interpretation and original photos of this galaxy and this was an intentional artistic choice that i made during the production of this work. I could have made a more faithful adaptation of this galaxy but instead I seized on an opportunity to take a different perspective on it.  Both the point of view shift and the highly increased vibrancy of the galaxy were mid-way decisions that i made because the dark and gloomy version just felt lacking to me.

That was when I decided to dial up the saturation and take this galaxy from dark and ominous to bright and inspiring. leaning on a combination of realism and expressionism I was able to bring out the dual-disk counter rotating blue/orange structure of the galaxy, shifting the perspective and making the outer arms far more dense than in the reference images. in the process i was able to fully capture the energy and motion of stellar bodies in a way that compliments the overall composition. In many ways this Piece was the birthplace and first point of comparison for my style of Cosmic Visionary Realism.