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EUROPE'S MOST VISITED SF/F WEB SITE |
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Here comes the 'Egg' man
With four Hugos and a Chesley, Bob Eggleton is one of the most
renowned SF and fantasy artists in the world. And he has a really
amazing haircut too!
Bob: Well, art evolves - it grows, it changes. Working in different media is simply fun for me to do. It's learning all the time. I hadn't worked in oils for yonks, and then I saw that people like Steve Youll were doing it, so I had to re-explore this sensual medium. Acrylics have their own delightful properties but oils have time and honour in back of them. The "controversy" about my shift in media is a double-edged blade, as it were. On one hand, fine artists are always experimenting, but commercially people get nervous because you're never really known for any one sort of thing. The happiest I've ever felt painting is the way I feel painting now. Interestingly, The Book of Sea Monsters [also available from Paper Tiger] seemed to go along gender lines: females loved it and males - at least, a good many of them - kind of wondered why I should do such an about-face. Art should be a matter of Love It Or Hate It, though . . .
PT: In parallel with the shift of style there's been, perhaps inevitably, a shift in subject matter from straight sf to "soft" sf and fantasy. Does this represent also a shift in your own interests? Bob: Yes. Absolutely. I tend of late to be a technophobe. In particular, I think artists are relying too much on the computer. It's a great tool for touchups and for exploring possible options in a given drawing or painting, but when the medium starts becoming bigger than the artist doing it - look out. I recently became more in tune with organic stuff - nature and all that. As I reach 40 I long for the lazier, less hectic times. I see people with cell phones, fax machines, computers and all that and, while they this illusion the gadgets are making life easier, in fact their lives are actually getting more complex. So when I paint an sf piece I tend to take a pastoral approach - yeah, the techie stuff is there, but not at the expense of the natural environment. Because after all the cell phones have broken, the computers gone down and such, it comes down to the real joy of just sitting under a tree on a summer day and letting the breeze gently touch you. I'm not trying to outpaint technical advances either. If I do a spaceship it's my spaceship, not something designed by NASA that's bound to change next week anyway. PT: Reverting to those comparisons with Turner, how does it feel to have your name associated with such an artistic giant? Do you think, had he been alive today, he too would have at least part of the time have been painting fantasy art?
Bob: I feel a kindredship with Turner. I've read up on him. Not only did he paint fast, he dared other artists to change their directions. I do that all the time! Turner would turn a sketch into a finished painting in a day, and I've been known to do that, too. And I love being compared to him! I dedicated Sea Monsters to him because he did sea monsters in one of his paintings, but even before the book was published people were already saying, "Hey, this stuff looks a bit like Turner's." The fact that I'm still years away from attaining anything like his mastery doesn't bother me - in fact, it gives me something to aim at. My belief is you always need someone so far ahead of you as an artist that you'll never reach their level of artistic brilliance - but the journey you take in trying to get to that destination is, in a way, the destination itself. I regard him as a fantasy artist as much as, say, Gustav Moreau or even Eugene Delacroix - another couple of recent influences on my work. And fantasy art is what he'd be doing if he were alive today. Indeed, there's so much fantasy art in museums by Turner, Moreau, Delacroix, Bocklin, Leighton, Magritte . . . it's just no one has dared call it "fantasy art". They end up with something like "symbolism" or "romanticism" . . . PT: The Book of Sea Monsters has been very well received. What made you decide to make the next book, Greetings from Earth, more of a portfolio book than a "subject" book? Bob: It was needed. I did Alien Horizons [also available from Paper Tiger] back in 1995 and it did very well. I've painted all sorts of new images since then. And I can't tell you how many SF fans have come up to me and said, "Alien Horizons seems like a Part One. When are you going to do another collection? So I wanted to Sea Monsters next but to follow it up with a new portfolio. This one, however, will have more of a softer tone to it. It'll have something like 20 unpublished images, a lot of my landscapes and such, plus tons of sketches and preliminaries. Alien Horizons had mainly my book-cover and magazine art. This will have plenty of those as well, but with a fair helping of self-commissioned fine art pieces. PT: Reading the books whose covers you illustrate must take up much of your reading time. Left to your own devices, what other books do you tend to read? Bob: Publishers rarely send me the manuscripts to read these days! All they tend to send me are a couple of pages - in one case it was just a couple of sentences. The only briefing I get is: "Here. Do that." Which is a bit frightening when "that" is just a few paragraphs. As for what I read for myself . . . hm. Books on philosophical stuff, these days, and lots of books on moviemaking. PT: And the inevitable final question: whither the future? Bob: Ah, who can say? I try to go day by day. As Master Jedi Qui Gon Jinn says in Star Wars, "Live in the moment, be mindful of the future." I'll always paint. I'm also working back to doing sculpture. I did it yonks ago and enjoyed it so much I forgot to do any painting, so I had to drop the sculpting in a hurry in order to earn a living. But it's a lot of fun and a real challenge to make something literally 3D: unlike in a painting, there really is another side to that dragon, and you have to sculpt it! I know I'll always be creative. And creative people are rebels - they have to carve their marks in the vapid white walls of normalcy and mediocrity. Until the day they die. A version of this article originally appeared in The Snarl, Paper Tiger's reader zine. Many thanks to Snarl's Editor extraordinaire, Paul Barnett (www.papertiger.co.uk), for letting us recycle their prose.
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OTHER CONTENT - January 2003
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PT:
Obviously it's been widely talked about in the business
that you've comparatively recently shifted from the airbrush approach
to oils on canvas. I understand this has brought you a lot of applause
- comparison with J.M.W. Turner and so on - but also a certain
amount of flak. What's been your reaction to this?
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