DANIEL ZELLER

I was very grateful to have the Cassini mission as a launching point for this drawing (Cassini’s 20 year mission ended last september when it crashed into Saturn). There are obvious reasons Titan is so appealing; Saturn’s largest moon has an atmosphere, deserts and seas – it is an alien world with some characteristics we can relate to.

The probe generated so much fascinating source material it was difficult to choose any single viewpoint, but there was something particularly intriguing about the image of Titan I finally settled on. Greyscale imagery naturally lends itself to broad interpretation, and the radar-mapping method suited my curiosity and my process; it seems to relay its subject as somehow simultaneously familiar and completely alien. Titan’s surface became a scaffold on which I could build and explore. The relative ambiguity of the source image allowed me wide latitude to interpret the moon as a stand-in for any not-yet-discovered world or landscape, while still allowing it to be grounded in the recognisable projection of topography.

The Cassini mission was a truly amazing foray into the unknown. We are greatly enriched by the knowledge it collected. My work is but a humble homage to our immediate neighbourhood – once so far away and now a little bit closer – and to what is yet to be discovered on many frontiers.

Daniel Zeller is an illustrator and painter based in New York. His work, inspired by informative images and maps forged by scientific inquiry, resembles microscopic views of intricate cellular structures and macroscopic perspectives of satellite panoramas. He seeks to push the compositional boundaries of a limited range of media, working with ink, acrylic and graphite on paper. His works are part of permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. www.danielzeller.net