Pioneering Artists
Every chrome rocket and glowing skyline in this archive began at somebody’s drawing board. These are the hands that painted tomorrow — the working artists keeping the dream lit, and the original visionaries who sketched it first. Each profile links to the artist’s own portfolio or socials, and to our coverage in the Atomic Daydream archive.
The Contemporary Visionaries
Working artists carrying the retro-future forward, one canvas, collage, and salvage-yard robot at a time.
Matthew Lyons
Illustrator · United Kingdom
Sun-faded tones, geometric serenity, and airships drifting past modernist terraces. Lyons paints stills from films that don’t yet exist, with editorial work for the BBC, The New York Times, Google, and WIRED.
Portfolio ✦ Read our feature →
Manzel Bowman
Digital collage · New York
Tribal attire, Egyptian iconography, and space-age geometry collide in Bowman’s electric Afrofuturist collages — ancient symbols wired straight into the cosmos.
Instagram @artxman ✦ Prints on Society6 ✦ Read our feature →
Orkhan Isayev
Illustrator · Azerbaijan
His Utopia series redraws the Sagrada Família, the Colosseum, and the Sydney Opera House beneath skies full of flying cars — equal parts 1980 and 2080, in muted Art Deco tones.
Behance ✦ Instagram @isayev_art ✦ Read our feature →
Renaud Marion
Photographer · France
In the Air Drive series, vintage Mercedes and Jaguars hover a meter above ordinary streets — the flying-car future we were all promised, idling quietly at the curb. Raised on Blade Runner and Moebius, Marion makes the impossible feel parked next door.
Portfolio ✦ Read our feature →
Sylvain Viau
Digital artist · France
Viau lifts classic French machines — Peugeots, Citroëns, the occasional Mercedes — clean off their wheels, turning workaday hatchbacks into serene, harbor-side hovercraft.
Kostya Petrenko
Graphic designer · Czech Republic
That slightly pixelated analog glow of 1980s video, applied to city logos from Tokyo to Rio — neon, grain, and civic pride by way of VHS.
Kaylan Michel
Mixed-media collage · Montreal
Working as Lost in the Island, Michel layers flowers, flying saucers, and African heritage into vivid Afrofuturist portraits that cheerfully refuse categorization — Basquiat and Klimt among her guiding stars.
Artist profile at Sayaspora ✦ Read our feature →
Tal Avitzur
Sculptor · California
Salvage-yard treasure becomes wide-eyed retro robots — Avitzur’s “Talbots” channel 1960s sci-fi through found brass, aluminum, and vintage gauges, assembled like puzzles with no picture on the box.
Portfolio ✦ Instagram @talbotics ✦ Read our feature →
Trashriot
Collage artist
Torn paper, weathered textures, and mid-century ephemera collaged with avant-garde energy — living proof the analog cut-and-paste future is alive and well in the age of the algorithm.
Instagram @trashriot ✦ Read our feature →
The Original Dreamers
The visionaries who sketched tomorrow first — long before tomorrow had other plans.
Albert Robida
Illustrator & novelist · France, 1848–1926
Decades before television existed, Robida drew the téléphonoscope, air taxis over Paris, and electric everything. Where Jules Verne wrote the future, Robida drew it — the genre’s founding daydreamer.
Wikipedia ✦ Read our feature →
Charles Schridde
Illustrator · United States, 1950s–60s
His “House of the Future” ads for Motorola put glass living rooms under waterfalls and hi-fis in the cliffside — luxury tomorrow, sponsored by the transistor. His visions later echoed through the set design of Incredibles 2.
Robert McCall
Space artist · United States, 1919–2010
The artist NASA called when the future needed painting. McCall’s murals fill the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, his concept art helped shape 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his canvases gave us floating cities, Mars greenhouses, and a tomorrow that always looked worth the trip.
McCall Studios ✦ Read our feature on Moss & Fog →
Rick Guidice & Don Davis
NASA’s space colony painters · United States, 1970s
Commissioned for the NASA Ames space settlement studies, their paintings of Bernal spheres and toroidal farmland made orbital suburbia feel inevitable — whole towns and countrysides curled inside spinning glass. You can trace a straight line from these canvases to Elysium.
1970s space colony drawings → ✦ NASA’s concepts for space colonies →
This directory grows as the archive does. Know an artist painting tomorrow the way it used to look? Explore the archive, trace the full history in Moss & Fog’s Retrofuturism guide, or tell us who we’re missing.
Atomic Daydream 