John Berkey Space and Sci-Fi Art

John Berkey is an artist who is famous for his space and sci-fi-themed works. He created some of the early artwork for the original Star Wars trilogy. He has worked as a freelance artist since the 1960s, after an eight-year stint at a St. Paul, Minnesota advertising agency. He resides in Excelsior, Minnesota.

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Note: All artwork and images copyright © John Berkey. Please do not use images without the permission.

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Link: John Berkey online gallery at ArtOrg.info. This is by far the best gallery of Berkey’s paintings on the web but all pictures medium size. Photos and article.

The Art of John Berkey by Jane Frank

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Book Description: Jane Frank examines all aspects of Berkey's work, with more than 100 color illustrations drawn from all periods of his career-including personal illustrations painted for his own artistic satisfaction. Berkey himself contributes an autobiographical introduction. His wonderfully facile style is the perfect balance between painterly impressionism and hard-edged realism.

From Booklist: His art is no less realistic than most sf illustrators work, but John Berkey, one of the most admired sf artists, differs markedly from most of the artists on view in Grant and Humphrey's Chesley Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Art. For he is, as Frank lucidly contends in her appreciative text, a forthright impressionist. Light is his primary concern; asked by young artists how he starts a painting, he tells them, "With the light--that is, the light sources within the picture." He lets brushwork show chiefly for its suggestion of movement but also because he knows that the eye makes sense out of daubs of pigment, and he wants his paintings to engage viewers' imaginations. Hence, he renders one brilliantly convincing spaceship after another, which in their details, however, resemble nothing that yet exists. They are extrapolations from the human, animal, and machine shapes he limns so well in his pre-sf and contemporary non-sf art, examples of which also distinguish this dazzling album.
Ray Olson. © American Library Association.