You may recall DNEG's Robin Konieczny citing sci-fi artist Chris Foss as an early inspiration. Foss's strikingly colourful and idiosyncratic spaceship designs dominated the 'big books of fantasy art' of my adolescence. What I didn't know before putting this edition of The Supplement together is that Foss was also responsible for the illustrations in The Joy Of Sex!
"It’s hard to overstate the influence Chris Foss has had on our collective vision of the future... Until he arrived on the scene, the future was a needle sharp, sleek-looking place that got less and less human. Chris introduced us to a human future, where space ships were “rumbling bumbling bangy things with bits of metal hanging off.”
“My first break was with erotic artwork,” he says. “Because that’s what they wanted at Bob Guccione’s new magazine, Penthouse.” And strangely, once you know of this ‘other side’ you can see that it somehow suffuses the SF images too. An intimate familiarity with the human form, not just as an object but as a sexual form produces an organic way of seeing the world… Chris has produced covers for just about every classic SF author – Philip K Dick, Heinlein, and he was the Asimov man for a long time. In the 1970s, Chris was the source of SF imagery: “JG Ballard too. I did a lot of his covers.”
An editor at Penthouse guided Chris to recruit an agent, as he was being limited by the work he was getting on the magazine. “The first big job I got was for the Sunday Times, illustrating an article by Stan Kubrick on ESP.”
“… I started on Dune with Alejandro Jodorowsky.” This maverick genius had bought the rights to Frank Herbert’s masterpiece and convinced a French industrialist to make it. “The work we did for Dune ended up as the basis for Alien..."
Read the complete article @ imaginefx.com
Visit Chris Foss's official website here.
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