Tuesday 4 January 2022

New Art Riot #7

 I haven't posted any art here for a very long while, but I did splash some paint around over Christmas. Here is the result. Not quite sure if it's finished yet, but I'll certainly put it aside for the time being before revisiting with a fresh eye. Acrylic ink on untreated canvas board.



14 comments:

  1. Happy New Year Alastair. I love the artwork, at a quick glance I thought it was a frog you had imagined in one of those ponds close to home, then a closer look makes it obvious that it is no frog. Wonderful.

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  2. A new creature to dig in? :) Happy new year by the way Al! Can't wait to read your new upcoming novels!

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  3. Scene from Absolution Gap? Pretty good.

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  4. It looks like a luxury liner traveling between underwater cities on Europa or some water world in a distant star system. I love windows on ships, impractical as they are, and something like this suggests large viewing lounges with floor to ceiling windows. I like how the art style is reminiscent of the awesome SF covers of the 70s.

    On an unrelated topic, I was wondering about the imagos from Belladonna Nights/House of Suns universe.

    In the short story they're automatically conjured by whatever machinery and networks exist on the shatterling reunion planet, but the fact that the imagos have internal thought processes, are self aware and can edit their own memories suggests that they are full artificial intelligences rather than simulations.

    Is that right? It seems to me they're the rough equivalent of the Machine People, but without the embodied cognition.

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    1. Hi Nik, yes definitely a spaceliner of some kind.

      As for Belladonna Nights, one must suppose that the different lines implement their imagos with varying degrees of autonomy, up to and including something close to self-awareness.

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  5. Besides Foss (who I think is in everyone's top 10 list) and the people that have worked on your covers (I have the Tomislav Tikulin art book you once recommended) are there many working SF artists today you especially like? I've got books by Sparth, Fred Gambino, Tim White, Raphael Lacoste, Jim Burns, Stephan Martiniere, Doug Chiang, John Harris and a few others.

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    1. I'm steeped in the SF illustration of the 70s and 80s, so Foss, very definitely, but also Chris Moore, Jim Burns, Tim White, Tony Roberts, Peter Elson, and Peter Alan Jones (PAJ), among others. Going back, I'm a great admirer of the 30s and 40s illustration by Hubert Rogers, who I think was way ahead of his time.

      Of those working now, Tomislav, Dominic Harman, Marc Simonetti and many others. Jim Burns is mostly doing private commissions now I believe.

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  6. Thats great work Alastair!

    It reminds me a little of Chris Foss in style - just lovely!

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  7. What about Frank Kelly Fries , David Hardy and Vincent Di Fate. You people don't read the science fiction magazines ?

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  8. Fries very good, also David Hardy, although I tend to think of him as more of an astronomic artist who occasionally puts spaceships into his compositions. I know him, too, very nice man. I confess Di Fate's work has never quite clicked with me. And Hubert Rogers, whom I mentioned above, was a magazine stalwart. I could also have mentioned Ed Emshwiller. As soneone who did not grow up with any direct experience of the magazines, though, my tastes are inevitably shaped by the mass market paperbacks of the UK SF scene.

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