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"Solar Wind"
Born
out of the original paperback book cover for Larry Niven's book
"Protector" published by Futura Publications in the late 1970's, the
above image is the ultimate manifestation of what has been, in fact, a
series of related paintings. The cover image created for the book
"Solar Wind" was an extrapolation from the first piece prompted by
Roger Dean at a meeting with the artist at his then Fulham Road studio
in London in 1979.
Roger
had suggested that the Protector image be used for the forthcoming
Solar Wind Anthology published in 1980 by Dragon's World but there were
copyright, contractual, and creative relationship issues that made this
problematic and so, at the eleventh hour, a cover painting already
created by the artist for the anthology of works was put aside and there followed an intense week
in which the artist did not leave his basement studio and worked round the clock to
create a variant of the Protector cover art.
As
the years rolled on, the sheer popularity of the image became such that many
publishers wanted to use, and indeed commission new variants of, the
various versions of the image but the version created for the Solar
Wind book was deliberately never sold, or licensed for reproduction, remaining a painting kept exclusive to this
day by the artist and reproduced by nobody else under contract.
The
Dragon's World edition of the book was extremely successful but only scratched the
surface of the "Solar Wind Wind Picture Library" a division of the
artist's company that housed, and still houses, all the Solar Wind
copyright, and so eventually, as a contemporary luxury edition of the
book came on to the market published by Legendary Art Publishing, a yet
newer, and ultimate and final, version of the image was needed as the
layout for the wraparound cover of the luxury opus edition is bigger
and physically longer than the original 1980s editions.
So it is that the above version is the ultimate and quite possibly the very final manifestation of the "Solar Wind" cover art.
The
artist is known for continually working on and refining his visual ideas and
there were numerous drawings and colour sketches produced over the years of the Solar Wind character, a few of which we
show here,
a set of miniature paintings that tracked the development of the
alien's crest, which evolved from a hollow bone rendering (based on a
Toucan's crest) to the mid era variant which added a sensory protrusion
and the contemporary variant which envisages a "fully mature" crest
that houses a complete set of extra-sensory capabilities as an extension
of the main brain core, an idea inspired by meditating Yogis who, if they
mediate a lot, develop extra protrusions to their skulls to house extra
physical growth of their brains.
The currently available luxury book editions are here.
The main image at the top of the page is the ultimate "Solar Wind" collector's original painting, and you can contact us about it here
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