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| Clipper ship on alien planet |
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| Acrylic and airbrush - probably 1987 |
Until about the point where I made my first fiction sale, I sort of had intentions of becoming an SF artist. To that
end I painted dozens - hundreds - of pictures, right through the seventies and eighties, moving from felt tip to watercolour,
to pastels and acrylics and gouache and eventually airbrush and more recently oils and digital. I've never really stopped
painting, and I do still finish the occasional piece, but at some point the writing became the thing I was most interested
in doing professionally, and I quietly buried any remaining aspirations about becoming a paid artist. I think that was the
sensible thing, too. Not because these pictures are entirely hopeless - I'm aware of their flaws (painfully so in one or two
cases) yet they're certainly no worse or more derivative than the stories I was working on at the same time - but because
making a living as a pro SF artist is, I suspect, several times tougher than being a full-time writer. Even in the late
seventies, when paperback illustration was booming, there were nowhere near as many SF artists in employment as there were
writers, and if anything things have only worsened since then.
Looking back at these pictures now, which span a few years in the middle of the eighties, I think it's pretty obvious
that I had yet to find my own style. The artists I most admired, and whose work I slavishly analysed, were Chris Foss, Chris
Moore, Peter Elson, Peter Jones, Tony Roberts, Jim Burns and Roger Dean - and I think you can easily see where the influence
of one or the other was dominating in a given picture. The robot, for instance, is pure Chris Moore, only not as good.
I was also struggling with incorporating a human dimension into these dizzying vistas of super-advanced technology
(no change there then). I got bored with painting just spaceships, but getting people - preferably Kate Bush - into the
scene was pushing my limited drawing skills to breaking point. Another reason why I did less and less painting was that the
pictures were just taking too damned long: as I got more into airbrush technique, using layers and masks, the paintings
went from the work of days to weeks, months. And when I left home in 1985, I didn't take my painting equipment with me. Everything
painted after that point, until I settled down in Holland, was done during university vacation. This is really just the tip
of the iceberg, though - there's a lot more I could inflict on the world.
Of all of the pictures here, I think I like this clipper ship the best, even if the sails do look a little weedy for
the size of the hull. I think the sea came out pretty well, and I like the towering domed city-on-pinnacle in the distance.
Click on any of the images to see a larger version.
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