The Art of John Harris: Beyond the Horizon

Product Information

John Harris has produced book covers for many science fiction authors including famous names such as John Scalzi, Ben Bova, and Orson Scott Card. In fact, Scalzi himself, calls the artist’s work highly iconic, the phrase he uses is “Bookstore Iconic — which is to say it can be seen from across the bookstore.” (Harris p4) It is bold, striking, intense art that guarantees a good read. John Harris has also illustrated online fiction and produced artwork for NASA. He was born in the Bronx, New York, one of 12 children of James Harris, a grocery clerk, and his wife, Mary (nee Rowan). Originally wanting to be a pilot or an actor, John found his calling as a photographer after seeing Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. He adopted as his professional name the double-barrelled Benton-Harris to make his surname more distinctive The striking paintings and illustrations of English artist John Harris imagine a brightly colored, haunting world beyond Earth and even beyond the stars.”– Flavorwire There were many committees and professorships, prizes and honours, but Harris first entered the public consciousness as the supreme self-declared “country house snooper” in two electric and episodic memoirs, No Voice From The Hall (1998) and Echoing Voices (2002). He is survived by Jane and their three children, Emma, Mark and Jessica, and five grandchildren, and by seven of his siblings.

Brodovitch’s students also included at various times Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, and Benton-Harris’s close friend Tony Ray-Jones, with whom he shared a New York apartment and a photographic philosophy. Both would have an approach in mind when something interesting started to develop before their cameras, and had a kindness about them, with a rich visual language to express their ideas. Although Harris’s interests were centred on the 18th century, the 64 Heinz exhibitions that preceded his retirement in 1986 were immensely wide-ranging, including Richard Norman Shaw, James Stirling, Giovanni Michelucci and Carlo Scarpa. But it is worth singling out Silent Cities (1977), curated by Gavin Stamp, on cemeteries of the Great War, a subject near to Harris’s heart, and the pioneering Eileen Gray (1973), curated by Alan Irvine. Thanks to Harris’s energetic curatorship the collection grew apace, and from 1969 to 1984 a model 18-volume catalogue was published, edited by Jill Lever, Harris himself contributing Inigo Jones and John Webb (1972) and Colin Campbell (1973). Rainmaker Entertainment based in Vancouver, hired Harris in 2007, to work on The Weinstein Company's movie, Escape from Planet Earth. [6]

Join & Support

Hugo Awards". World Science Fiction Society. Archived from the original on 6 September 2015 . Retrieved 20 April 2014. John's painting of Spindizzy (an anti-gravity device), from James Blish's Cities in Flight omnibus Where's the coolest place that your job has taken you? If you’re looking for something to set your mind wandering and spark some inspiration, I highly recommend a trip Beyond the Horizon – and take the kids, too.”– Geek Dad

In 2010 Harris became a regular contributor to the exhibitions of the Symposium of Imaginative Realism (Illuxcon). I start with an abstraction and I let the feelings coalesce into form,” said Harris. “And because I’m thinking in the context of science and science fiction, the forms that I find on the canvas end up relating to those ideas.” Harris published an article in Granta in 1962 on Cambridge's 19th-century architect/developer Richard Reynolds Rowe. He taught drawing for 25 years in the Cambridge Arts School (CCAT, now Anglia Ruskin University), and painted (topography and light) until this career came to end with a joint exhibition between the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge University School of Architecture. A catalogue was published by the Fitzwilliam Museum. The distinguished architectural historian John Harris, scion of a dynasty of upholsterers, spent his early years in a dim semi-detached house in suburban Cowley, on London’s western fringe. The rebellious child found solace in his bachelor Uncle Sid, whose passion for fishing, for archaeology and literature, and for exploring country estates was an inspiration.Of particular note is the 'Works by Author' appendix, which displays several illustrations side by side, all the better to see how they work as a whole over the course of a given series. For myself, who came to Harris' artwork through Scalzi's 'Old Man's War' series, to see several illustrations from the books laid out together was both a chance to re-examine the paintings together, as well as an opportunity to reflect on a series of books I thoroughly enjoyed.

During the early 1980s Harris was commissioned by Sinclair Research to produce cover art for the user manuals of the ZX81, [5] and ZX Spectrum home computers. His paintings are absolutely dripping with massive scale, temperature, atmospheric motion, “otherness”, a marriage of the alien and the recognizable, and far future antiquity. He provides a real aged quality to everything he paints. Everything feels old and lived in: ancient ships, xeno-archaeological remnants, etc. He provides just enough detail to spark your imagination, but he leaves the edges blurred, ambiguous and almost out of focus, so you have to fill in the mental blanks yourself. It all has a photographic feel to it, although no one would confuse his painting for photographs. How he manages to do this with a paintbrush is beyond me. It’s like he thinks through a lense and paints it with a brush. Just like reading a story, you meet the artwork halfway with your own imagination and fill in the blanks. I was thrilled to discover that for many of his images, he has also written a rough history or story to correspond. He has imagined a whole world that we only glimpse a single moment of. He is able to show us this history and story with just a still image. It’s such perfect art to be paired with novels.Since Harris’ work is imaginative and painted in interesting ways, this work is worth adding to collections of illustration art fans and those of painters in general.”– Art Contrarian For those who need to get lost in epic science fictions scenes that will capture your wonderment. 10/10.”– Adventures in Poor Taste The state of sci-fi and fantasy art is a contentious issue. It's a hugely varied industry, but more and more now, I see the level of technical ability going through the roof.

Born on 29 July 1948 in London, England, [1] Harris began painting aged 14 and entered Luton College of Art at the age of 16. After completing a foundation course, he entered Exeter College of Art in 1967 to study painting. Graduating in 1970 [1] he travelled and studied transcendental meditation, an increasing influence on his works. On his return to England in 1976, Harris began exploring the theme of monumental scale and space, producing a series of science fiction art. In the late 1970s he joined Young Artists, the premier agency for the emerging movement of science fiction art in the UK. If I do have a gripe, it's that the influence of the comic strip tends to dominate the industry, particularly in film. This limited edition is presented with an exclusive art print called Shai-Hulud, signed by the John Harris. In 1984 Harris was commissioned to create a painting of the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre. [1] He was captivated by the intense tangerine glow created by the craft's exhaust and made a painting of the shuttle's gantry tower, bathed in light. That work is now part of the Smithsonian Museum Collection. [2] His new book provides a fantastic primer for that long and varied career, along with some great insight into his process.”– The VergeIn 1984 I went to the States for the first time. That spring I'd had the privilege of meeting Arthur C Clarke in Sri Lanka, and there I met a friend of his, Freddie Durant III. Harris was born in 1943, in North Staffordshire; he had an itinerant, partly colonial youth. He was educated at Winchester College, where he was a scholar. He began in Architecture at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University in 1961, and finished in Art History. Other projects included Americans in Europe, exhibited at the Santa Fe Centre for Photography in 1983; and Children of the Troubles, shot in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. A good selection of his work from England and New York was published in Creative Camera Collection 5 in 1978, and he was supportive in the research for and the making of the 2019 film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay, about the founder of Creative Camera magazine. This coffee table sized book is a treasure. Although ably introduced by John Scalzi and with commentary by Harris himself, the real joy of the book is the massive spreads, in full color, that allow the reader to examine in minute detail, sans text or markings, the images that have graced so many iconic covers. This is the perfect collection to adorn the coffee table of any science fiction fan.”– Geek Art Gallery