The artist's full name is Horace Mitchell! I just learned a lot more about him in a fascinating article that came out today - How a Houston company got its art on the walls of stoners across America.
Here's the section that talks about this artist and poster:
Horace Mitchell was an undergraduate student at Rice University in 1968. Though he was studying physics, he was an amateur artist who loved science fiction novels and comic books. After reading about the Houston Blacklight in a local paper, Mitchell went to downtown Houston, sketchbook in tow. He sold his sketches to Jones, which would become the basis of four posters the company would publish: "The Trip," "Hassles," "Saturn" and "Chess." Mitchell was inspired by the work of the legendary Marvel Comics artists Jim Steranko and Jack Kirby, whose covers depicted towering characters set against psychedelic space-age landscapes.
"I had always sketched and drawn even as a kid," Mitchell remembered. "I got this bug that I would try to draw some big things."
The posters that went to market are different from what Mitchell drew. Some were resized, and colors were changed to be trippier under a black light. But for Mitchell, it was an exercise in representing abstract emotions and thoughts—ideas like space and time, optimism about the future—in accessible ways.
"It was sort of groundbreaking, the kinds of things they put in the posters that then wound up hanging in students' rooms because they represented ideas that really resonated with the students," Mitchell said.
That experience would serve him well in a much different role. After he finished his master's and PhD, Mitchell went on to work at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, running the agency's Scientific Visualization Studio in 1991, making hundreds of videos explaining everything from Mars' magnetic fields to hurricane animations. His work has been on news channels around the nation and even appeared in Leonardo DiCaprio's 2016 documentary Before the Flood. But he has always seen his work for the Houston Blacklight as the foundation of his career.
"I always had a joke: people would ask, 'Well, are you a real artist?' And I'll say, yes, I am. I'm published, but only because of those four things that got printed," Mitchell joked.
Here's the full collection of Houston Blacklight posters, from University of Houton's digital collections.
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