Fanny on Mars

Fanny on Mars is a forthcoming volume in the Artists on Planets Series that focuses on the Finnish landscape painter Fanny Churberg (1845 – 1892). While not as famous as Vincent van Gogh or William Turner, Fanny was an innovative artist with a profound love of nature and is renowned in her native Finland. She was remarkable for her time, when there were few female landscape painters and even fewer who made a living at it. She travelled to deepen her education as an artist, first studying in Germany with practitioners of the Düsseldorf school of painting(a key influence on her landscape painting), and later in Paris. Fanny loved the natural environments of Finland and, while abroad, returned every summer to paint there. She excelled in capturing skies, clouds, and the varieties of light cast by the Moon and Sun. Fanny was a beloved painter of landscapes near rivers, lakes, and the sea, with trees and rocks imbued with feeling, and painted in all seasons, even in winter. Her art was influenced by Romanticism yet features her distinctive style of fast, expressive brushstrokes that give her paintings a special energy and life. Fanny’s love of Nature, her powers of observing, understanding, and painting the world around her, and her love of exploration all serve her well in Fanny on Mars.

In Fanny on Mars, a young Fanny also dreams of waking up in an unknown place. She follows a thousand-mile-long orographic water ice cloud that leads her to the slopes of Arsia Mons, an extinct shield volcano in the Tharsis Volcanic Provinceon Mars. Fanny ventures around the volcano until she finds the opening to a Martian lava tube, beginning her journey to explore Mars’s underground world. After a lengthy, enchanting descent, she makes a wondrous discovery: shimmering through a dome of ice like the Northern Lights from her home in Finland, Fanny discovers a subsurface aquifer teeming with bioluminescent life glowing all around her. Fanny Churberg is the third artist to explore Mars in what will be a quartet of Mars books in the Artists on Planets Series.