May 05, 2025
PROVIDED IMAGE/Giselle Brown
Giselle Brown, 17, alongside a drawing she made of her great-grandmother for her 100th birthday.
Giselle Brown was 14 when she started creating hyperrealism drawings and paintings, which resemble high-resolution photographs and can take months to complete. Now she's 17 and the next stop on her artistic journey is the moon.
Brown, from South Jersey, is part of the Lunar Codex project, which inscribes works by writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers onto a coin-sized medallion and sends it into space as a digital time capsule. For the sixth Lunar Codex mission, physicist and art collector Samuel Peralta is including the semifinalists, finalists and honorable mention submissions from the Art Renewal Center's Salon competition, which he judges. Four discs, called NanoFiche, will be aboard a lunar lander launched by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in December.
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"We're taking human culture and marrying it with science and archiving this for the future," Peralta said.
Weight and volume matter significantly when calculating space travel costs, and the NanoFiche is made from nickel and is 12 millimeters in diameter – about the size of a quarter. Images and words get scanned and then reprinted onto the surface of the device using a laser at a rate of 300,000 dots per inch.
The first launch took place in 2022, and this mission includes backups from all previous missions. In total, 250,000 miniature works from 50,000 artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians will be sent.
"If you stick this under a regular microscope ... you're going to see everything incredibly clearly as if it's real life," Peralta said.
An up-close look at the Lunar Codex technology.
Brown will have two pieces featured in the project, "Little Muse" and "Dad's Portrait." Brown started drawing when she was a child but began pursuing it more seriously as a teenager, when she finished the first version of the "Little Muse" charcoal drawing.
"It's called 'Little Muse' because my little sister, she always has an expression on her face that she always had something to say or tell," Brown said. "So that was the first piece that I really got into realism."
Brown said she's particularly inspired by her family, who are her main portrait subjects. In addition to creating images of her dad and sister, Brown also has done paintings of her mom and 100-year-old great grandmother, Dot. She said she likes to both capture their essence and have their soul in her pieces.
'Dad's Portrait' (left) and 'Little Muse' by Giselle Brown, a 17-year-old from South Jersey.
That emotional element comes through, according to Peralta, who said Brown's work is about more than just encapsulating an image.
"You look at the skill that this artist has ... not just in reproducing the subject matter, but also in creating a character and creating an emotion with that figure," Peralta said. "It's not nearly a photograph. It's also creating a circumstance where there's emotion, and I think that was what captured me particularly about those works."
Brown hopes to become a professional artist and is exploring more techniques, like how to paint and draw new textures such as fur for animal portraits. She also started taking lighting and photography classes so she can take her own reference photos and create art from the exact image that she – and her subjects – want to remember.
"I like being able to capture my subjects' essence and capturing a moment in time to share it with others, that's important to me," Brown said. "I like being able to share the moment and make them smile and feel it. They go back in time to the moment of the picture."
