A look at the night sky, away from the dazzling lights of the metros, reveals millions of stars. But that’s as far as our eyes can discern. The cosmos holds billions of galaxies, swirling nebulae, and bright objects that only a powerful telescope can unravel. Thanks to Cathrin Machin, you can now view these cosmic marvels in the form of glow-in-the-dark space art paintings. Her large-scale paintings are so realistic they can be easily mistaken for photos taken from a telescope.
For Machin, it all started four-and-a-half years ago when her artistic passion prompted her to quit her job and take up painting the cosmic universe as a full-time artist. In such kind of paintings, there’s little scope for imagination, since the objects need to be depicted as they actually appear.
Machin bases her photorealistic paintings either on the images gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope or from any other Astro-material she comes across. Since the universe is pitch black, her paintings are always on a black canvas. To make her vibrant cosmic scenes stand out, she uses phosphorescent pigments and exact brushstrokes.
Machin finds the universe both mysterious and fascinating, but painting it is not as easy as it looks. Sometimes, it takes Machin several months to complete one piece, since she has to fill in all the minute details, every speck of light and dust visible to the eye!
Machin’s only regret is the ever-increasing light pollution from city lights that continues to ‘steal’ the stars from us, night after night, due to advancing technology and population. It’s to her credit that her breathtaking and mesmerizing paintings bring out those aspects of the universe that we can never hope to actually see.
She has a viewership of over 83,000 on Instagram alone.
Cathrin Machin
