Fare Thee Well
Hoang Nguyen
June 26th, 2025
Major: Astronomy
Genre/Medium: digital illustration
About the work:
As this series comes to a close, I wanted to end with a farewell to the spacecraft. I’ve cast off the gold frames from “The Artifact” and “Childhood of the Planets” because we’re returning to the real world, a scene from the relatively near future at the moment that the spacecraft will swing by Mars before going the rest of the way alone.
The ship in a bottle from “Anniversary” makes an appearance. Here I wanted Psyche and the Falcon Heavy to be somewhat cherubic in appearance despite their mechanical bodies, as if they were Earth’s own beloved children heading off on a trip. I elected not to show Earth’s or Mars’s faces in detail—you can’t pick them out of the bunch in “Childhood of the Planets” either, so I decided to continue with the sense of mystery surrounding the planets we’re most familiar with. Flower petals fall out of Earth’s sleeve, the planet that begets life, and Mars is clothed in a dusty veil.
The suspended stars from “Childhood of the Planets” return, but now the terrestrial planets are hidden among them—between Earth and Mars, there seems to be something twinkling like a traveler passing by worlds. Over in the distance, and over a bridge of clouds like a lamb’s wool, Psyche the asteroid, which in this series has appeared only in pictures within pictures, hangs impossibly large in the sky, the destination and the culmination of all the work that’s been done so far.
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