USS Enterprise NCC-1701 Amid Red and Gold Nebulae — Print & Oil Painting

The white paint was flicked on. It has gone over the whole board, sky and hull alike, so the ship carries exactly the same freckling as the space around it and no surface in the picture is entirely clean.

The design deserves a plain description, because the title supplies only the bare registry and the shape is not the original one. The saucer is enormous, elliptical and pressed almost flat; the body hangs directly beneath it rather than behind, ending forward in a dark oval deflector; two short pale nacelles are carried close in on stubby pylons; an amber panel glows at the rear of the disc. This is the broad late arrangement, the one that took the name into the following century.

Two light events hold the composition together. At the lower right a gold-white blaze burns out from behind the ship and throws a violet trail past the nacelles; at the lower left a red nebula opens like a flower with four or five bright stars set into it. A dark dust lane crosses the whole width between them, and a small ringed planet hangs in the top right corner.

The handling is frank acrylic work: soft edges, a dry brush dragged through the cloud, the hull built from thin blue-green washes with the window rows dotted on last. It is a painting of a starship rather than a rendering of one, and it is much better for it. Filed in our Star Trek collection next to USS Enterprise's Saucer Above a Glowing Planet, which brings the same broad disc close enough to read the lettering.