Bruce Pennington. I adored his work as a young SF reader, always have, and grew up on all those Paper Tiger/Dragon's Dream editions of SF and fantasy illustration. What with the Brain CoralTM, alien rocks, life forms and sultry views of planets, moons and aurora. I later had an infatuation with Jim burns and Chris Moore when I decided I wanted to be an illustrator, subsequently coming to know them both. (Amazing to watch Chris paint, so fast and surgical. He later commissioned me to do a portrait of his wife. I would go on to buy five original Jim Burns paintings, in part to study them but mostly because they were so excitingly textural and strange.) I love the work of John Harris too, since I first saw his paintings. Ron Cobb, Syd Mead, Ralph McQuarrie, Bryan Froud, Alan Lee etc in film design. Moebius, Don Lawrence, Will Eisner, Winsor McCay etc in comics. Tim White, Jim, Chris, and a few others in book illustration. All that said, there was nothing really comparable to that sense of 'alieness' evoked by Bruce. I saw a massive exhibition of Roger Dean paintings on the Isle of Man a few years ago, which was the only time I've been similarly gobsmacked by SF/fantasy illustrations, certainly in a long while, largely because seeing the originals is a totally different experience to seeing them printed on covers and albums, for one thing the colours are absolutely fucking amazing and irreproducible by any other medium. Likewise seeing the Edward Hopper exhibition at Tate London twenty years ago, or the vast Alma-Tadema exhibition at the Walker Liverpool a few years before that, the Breughel room at the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna (not to mention Rembrandt's, Caravaggio's, Arcimboldo's etc) or visiting all my favourite Caravaggio's in situ across Malta, Rome, Naples and Sicily.
Anyway, the two below still give me chills. Nothing in cinema, comix or book illustration has ever came close to that first hit of Bruce's strange window to somewhere else. Only life itself has exceeded them, strangely enough.
