Growing Up...With This Amazing Art

 While doing a little surfing tonight, I came across some artwork of Robert McCall. There's a good chance you've also seen his artwork, but if you're of a certain age, you've definitely seen it. He created the mind-blowing art for the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

I loved those posters.

At the time I was a little young and not the target audience for the film. Back then, you couldn't just fire-up your laptop/tablet/phone and watch not only clips of the movie, but the entire film itself. No, if you missed it in the theater or on TV (and some shows were never broadcast on the Big 3 networks...), you didn't get to see it. I think I finally saw the film for the first time in my twenties, some twenty-odd years after the movie was released, and some ten-odd years before the year 2001 actually arrived.

Back when this artwork was available, late 1960s, early 1970s, I was young, but it was also the time when real spaceships and astronauts floated weightless above our heads in space. To a child, seeing the double-wheeled space station and a jet-like spaceship (complete with PanAm logo...) seemed not only probable, but definitely possible.

Too bad things didn't quite turn out like that.

The art was to draw people to the movie, but for me, it took me far beyond a single film. It unlocked the possibility of imagination...effective art, indeed.