The Art of Orlando Jax

The Art Index

  1. The Laxfala series

Travelling inspiration

One of the most exciting aspects of travelling is thinking about it before you leave. But what inspires you to make that trip? For me it can be the advertising, but not the glossy "here is a video of the resort" type stuff. I find most appealing those adverts that just hint at something exotic or beautiful without really showing you what it is - your mind takes over and fills in the rest.

A slice from the Laxfala Vineyards poster.
A hint of a distance land, a glimpse of verdant forests and blue waters ...

Some of the best examples of this is found in the poster art produced for the new airlines that appeared in the 1920s and 30s, a time when aircraft were just becoming large and safe enough to make commercial flights a real possibility. Some of these posters are gorgeous in the way they juxtapose a sleek craft against a desirable destination - a destination that can now be reached in a few hours rather than the days it would have taken by boat and train. For some excellent examples of what I mean have a look at the book Art of the Airways by Geza Szurovy.

A slice from the Laxfala Glass Lake poster.
That sense of the desire to explore - to travel into your unknown, wonders to see ...

Fast forward and NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have done a similar thing, but this time those desirable destinations are other planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. This amazing machine, whose mission has now ended, detected planets by measuring the tiny variations in light given off by stars as planets track in front of them. NASA and JPL commissioned a team of artists to render travel posters for a number of these new world and the results are fantastic. The one I find quite spooky in a way is PSO J318.5-22 - the planet with no star, a rogue, or free-floating planet.

The end of the Kepler mission is not the end of the story. On 18 April 2018 our search for habitable planets took another step forward in the shape of TESS - the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. TESS was launched on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and will be able to search for Earth like planets orbiting stars which are anywhere between 30 to 100 times brighter than those surveyed by Kepler. NASA hopes TESS will reveal thousands of new Earth and Super-Earth planets that can then be examined more closely by the new James Webb Telescope and existing large ground based telescopes. The great news is that on 8 January 2020 TESS found its first Earth sized planet orbiting in a habitable zone. The planet - TOI 700 d.

A slice from the Laxfala Sea Henge poster.
A new world to us, but what of others? Have other forms of intelligent life walked these pathways ...

It's important that in the future people do make the trip to see new worlds or Orlando Jax will have nobody to steal from. The book opens with the attack on the pleasure cruiser the Eversence. The back story is that the Eversence is a space liner operated by Cerulean Space Lines, a company that has been trading since the days before faster than light speed, when all that was possible were visits to the planets within the solar system. Once the pride of the fleet was the Archangel, a ship that picked up passengers from the MBX space elevator for a direct run to the resort on Olympus Mons, Mars. Now Cerulean operates a fleet of faster than light luxury clippers to several destinations including the magnificent world of Laxfala. Inspired by these ideas I've created my own series of vintage travel posters from the future based on what people will find on the luxury planet of Laxfala.

Poster by Rupert Brown, Cerulean Space Liners to Laxfala.
The first image of Laxfala taken by the Serĉanto Navigator who discovered the planet. A jewel in the dry desert of space that gave humanity hope and the proof that we are not alone.
Poster by Rupert Brown, Cerulean Space Liners to the luxury planet of Laxfala.