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All Paintings & Prints
can be supplied in
"ready to hang"
handmade and
hand-embellished
"Artist
Frames"
About
"Artist" Frames
All Paintings & Prints
can be supplied in
"ready to hang"
handmade and
hand-embellished
"Artist Frames"
All Paintings & Prints
can be supplied in
"ready to hang"
handmade and
hand-embellished
"Artist Frames"
"Fire.The
Artist's name for a picture created for Arrow Books in the UK who
re-published Sharra's
Exile, a fantasy novel written by Marion Zimmer Bradley and part of
the Darkover series of books. This
was a unique commission, in fact the whole series of cover
pictures created by the Artist for Arrow's re-release of the
Zimmer-Bradley books were, in that the design task was NOT to
illustrate a fantasy novel as if it were for the Science Fiction and
Fantasy market.In
"fannish" terms, a wikki site states "After
the Age of Chaos had almost destroyed civilization on the planet of the
Bloody Sun, even the Sharra had been exiled, but now the Sharra had
returned, embodied in the image of a chained woman wreathed in flames,
an image which could change the history of Darkover forever . . . . . .
. . ." which is the kind of description that would get any Science
Fiction and fantasy Artist's creative juices flowing, but in Peter's
case, because he had gained a reputation with publishers of increasing
sales in books because his works had both fan and genre-focused
elements in his them but also attributes that made them far more widely
accepted, in what publishers termed "the main market" and these days
would be described as "the mass market" he was commissioned to
expressly design pictures that aimed their re-published series of books
specifically at this wider market.The
brief stated that "these books don't sell any more, beyond what they
have already achieved, so we want to get a second life out of them and
we want to do this via a new way of pitching the cover imagery."In
short, in order to sell more Zimmer-Bradley fantasy books the art
direction was to not
make then look like "genre" books.The
novel itself and the second chapter of book one Sharra's Exile
was originally published as a a short story titled
"Blood Will Tell" which the Artist originally considered titling his
painting. In the final outcome he decided he wanted to paint a series
of images based on this one and revolving around the idea of
the
elements, fire, wind, air and water.Although
the Artist paints many other subjects, the roots of all of it, even his
rural art and in some small ways his aviation art, have their roots in
his Science Fiction works, for it is his vibrant imagination that fuels
it all.There
are many Science Fiction writers who enjoyed a second if not
third lease of life in some of their writings as a result of
the
Artist's willingness to break conventions, challenge accepted views and
find what the paperback industry referred to as "cover treatments" to
extend sales and therefore awareness of writer's works.Ironically,
paradoxically, that sometimes meant flying in the face of fannish or
genre-based views of how "a Science Fiction cover should look".In
case anyone thought these pictures "just happened" with nothing other
than a "what shall I paint today" attitude you may be surprised to here
that I once had the (exhausting) experience of a five-hour design
meeting with the Art Director on another famous series of covers by the
same publisher ."Progress"
was never an ill-considered matter, no matter the outcome . . . . .
See it in this
Collector's Edition book
