About the Artist

Dave Ginsberg, 2019
Photo credit: Dan Durda

Dave Ginsberg is an analytical left-brained artist and a creative right-brained engineer. His artwork combines his passions for spaceflight, astronomy, science, teaching, and the visual arts. Dave has been a member of the Graphic Artists Guild, and was a member of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA) and has served on its Board of Trustees.

His artwork has been displayed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Seattle's Museum of Flight, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Spacefest in Tucson, Arizona, The Art of Planetary Science exhibitions at the University of Arizona, the ASF Space Rendezvous in Houston, Texas, and the Digital Arts Festival in Redmond, Washington. Dave's 16-foot tall solar system mural was on permanent display at Seattle's Museum of Flight from 2007 to 2017.

His work has been published in the IAAA Pulsar magazine and Dennis Jenkins' book, Space Shuttle, Developing an Icon. Dave designed the insignia for collectSPACE which has been used as the website's brand identity since 2013. He created the logo for the National Association of Rocketry "Pay Forward" 2017 fundraising campaign.

Three of Dave's creations have made trips into Earth orbit and back, having flown on space shuttle Atlantis, the Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft, a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft, and the International Space Station.

View Dave's complete Curriculum Vitae.

Dave chose aerospace engineering for his livelihood, but has always maintained his interest in art and has continued to develop his skills and style. His thirty-four year career in engineering began in 1983. Dave worked in the field of conceptual and preliminary design of aircraft ranging from helicopters to commercial airliners. Early in his career he became involved in developing software to assist in designing aircraft. It was while working on those tools that he was exposed to the capability of computers to create images.

In 2000, he began to experiment artistically with computer graphics and animation with a free copy of Caligari trueSpace3 that came with an issue of Computer Arts magazine. His first formal instruction in 3-D modeling, animation, and rendering came in the summer of 2004 when he completed a certificate program in game animation at the University of Washington. The class provided his first exposure to 3ds max. Two years later he took a follow-up class in advanced animation techniques which helped him deepen his knowledge and practice his skills.

Passions

I believe the things that capture your imagination when you are young are the things that are most likely to become your life's passions later on. You may not have ended up following your true passions when you chose your career path for whatever reasons, but you will always want to come back to them. If you are searching for your passions in your adult life, look back to those childhood years to find them.

Between 1968 and 1972 NASA launched eleven Apollo manned spaceflight missions, nine of which sent men to the moon. I vividly recall watching the television broadcasts of those Moon missions, from launch to landing to splashdown under the trio of bright red and white parachutes. What happened beyond the view of the television cameras was simulated with fascinating animations and models. Scientifically accurate artwork in books and magazines filled in the gaps for us. These were the early seeds that fueled my present interest in space art, animation, and in collecting space memorabilia.

— DAG

Inspiration

My passion and skill as an artist began to develop at an early age. I grew up in the presence of art. My father was an illustrator for the U.S. Air Force for much of his career. There were always magazines about art and graphics around the house, and many of them were aviation and space related. I was drawn not only to the beauty of the artwork and the variety of techniques the artists used to create their work, but also was fascinated by the technical aspects of flight and the design of the craft that lifted humans into the sky and beyond.

Life, Look, and National Geographic magazines introduced me to the work of aviation and space artists such as Robert McCall, Keith Ferris, Paul Calle, Norman Rockwell, and Fred Freeman. Artist's renderings depicting the events of the space age as it was unfolding by Pierre Mion, Davis Meltzer, and Francis J. Krasyk featured in National Geographic magazines made a lasting impression. Growing up, I considered the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum my second home and took every opportunity study the beautiful art and murals on display there.

It was images by artists such as these that ignited my passion for space art. They also helped me to understand how spaceflight "worked". To call their work simply "space art" belies the underlying purpose of their meticulously accurate renderings. The magazines containing their artwork served the greater purpose of educating their reading audience about the very mechanics of the incredibly complex machines that were being built and the missions that were planned. They offered visual predictions of what was to come in the very near future. It is no stretch of the imagination to say that these paintings and illustrations inspired not only my interest in space art, but in engineering, as well. The fact that the subjects of the artwork were real things that were actually happening had a great deal to do with my interest in engineering and the sciences.

— DAG

Passions

Inspiration