In my internet wanderings recently, I happened across a mesmerizing gallery of images from Mars. As landscapes, the images are not really what you’d call beautiful, (unless you’re a geologist) consisting of monochrome fields of rocks and dirt. So what. Hey, what about the fact that… they are from friggin’ MARS!! How complacent with high technology and engineering are we that these pictures weren’t splashed everywhere across the internet? I don’t have the data, but I’d bet the house that Kim Kardashian got more hits at the time NASA released the Mars images. Not that long ago, the entire world came to a standstill and crowded around small black & white televisions to decipher the shadowy, grainy images from the first moonwalk. The moon is only a hop, skip and jump from us. The crisp, color images from Mars have traveled at least 34 million miles! Truly and literally amazing.

Martian landscape, as captured by NASA rover Perseverance

And this got me thinking about the delivery of the first images from a former “new world” that happened in the late 1500’s when explorers and entrepreneurs ventured to that era’s version of Mars - the North American continent. Though the technology back then consisted of graphite, ink and watercolor paint, the task was the same: capture the beauty of a wondrous new land and bring it home.

One of the first to attempt this was John White, a English artist and intrepid traveler who is credited with making the earliest images of America. White traveled with the early settlers to Roanoke Island in 1585, where he was commissioned to make watercolor sketches of the natives and their world. These images were copied into engravings back in England and widely published and marveled over. Incidentally, White was among the party that returned to Roanoke three years later and discovered the mysterious disappearance of the colony.

I wonder who will be the first artist to paint plain air on the Red Planet?