Richard Powers, Part First

As one does, I've been saving up for a dedicated Richard Powers post. The problem's been that I don't know where to stop. 

Other people just give up and dedicate whole blogs to the guy. I certainly understand. There's so much material, and it's so darn good; a person could spend many fruitful hours with this one artist's work. Surrealism, abstract expressionism, primitivism, street art, collage-- it's all there. Like Frazetta, Powers successfully straddled that fraught divide between fine art and illustration.

He died in 1996, but his birthday would be coming up on February 24...a Pisces, of course. 

The above sketch, probably a preliminary drawing for another illustration, is actually for sale here. 

The above painting was done in acrylic for the cover of Murray Leinster's War with the Gizmos, published by Gold Medal in 1958. 

Some of these images were found as part of an excellent article on Design Observer. On the image above, from Rick Poyner's "Unearthly Powers: Surrealism and SF": 

In later cover paintings, which are shown without type in The Art of Richard Powers by Jane Frank (2001), Powers constructs ambiguous pictorial spaces that seem to be both psychic and cosmic, molecular and planetary.

Some of Powers' paintings use mark-making in a way that remind me of nothing so much as Jean-Michel Basquiat, who worked much later with some of the same techniques. Powers liked to layer different styles and then use a visceral scrawl on top, creating an artificial palimpsest all his own.

Definitely more to come on Richard Powers.