Don Davis

Don Davis, space painter, has some recollections on his site about his relationship with Carl Sagan, and how Carl had "a pivotal effect on the vitality and development of space art through the Cosmos experience." It's definitely worth reading. There's also a lot of great photos on the page, like the one on the left, which I haven't seen anywhere else. Here is a brief excerpt enticing you to follow the link:

I first met Carl in the summer of 1972, through the efforts of Paul Fox, who worked at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where I hung out with people I knew there. I visited a commune known as 'The Land' atop the hills overlooking the Stanford campus, and brought with me a new painting of Mars and Phobos based on mariner 9 data. I partied and talked, then made my way to the end of one of the rooms where I saw Carl peering very closely at that painting. A short time later, we were introduced, and he complimented me on my work. He was editor of Icarus at that time, and when I reminded him of the Lunar evolution paintings recently appearing in a paper by Don Wilhelms, my supervisor at the U.S. Geological Survey, Carl related how he worked especially hard to reproduce them as well as he could. I remember asking him if he ever wanted to write science fiction, and he said that some of his colleagues thought that was what he was doing now! He gave a slide show filled with gorgeous imagery, of which he always had the highest quality examples.

Here's the link again.