The Art of John Harris: Beyond the Horizon

Product Information

His absorbing vistas, immense in scale, have graced book covers aplenty, but now they’re getting their own spotlight.”– Barnes and Noble

The striking paintings and illustrations of English artist John Harris imagine a brightly colored, haunting world beyond Earth and even beyond the stars.”– Flavorwire For those who need to get lost in epic science fictions scenes that will capture your wonderment. 10/10.”– Adventures in Poor Taste 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. This limited edition is presented with an exclusive art print called Shai-Hulud, signed by the John Harris. 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.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.

Titan Books has released another fabulous art book of a contemporary science fiction artist. The Art of John Harris, Beyond The Horizonis as beautiful as the images contained in it.”– Tor.com 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 Acerbic, sometimes splenetic, in controversy, a connoisseur and collector with an eagle eye, a lover of good hotels and rich food (red meat, preferably sanglant, truffles, clotted cream and substantial red wines were favoured), and a focus of merriment and laughter, John Harris could not abide earnest bores. His kindness towards young scholars, whom he liked and encouraged, was lifelong. His great scholarly achievements will endure, but his friends will most remember his generosity and sheer zest.

Join & Support

A collection of world-renowned visionary artist John Harris’ unique paintings captures breath-taking, otherworldly vistas on a massive scale. In 2010 Harris became a regular contributor to the exhibitions of the Symposium of Imaginative Realism (Illuxcon). 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. 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.

Past Winners of the Chesley Awards". Chesley Awards. Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists . Retrieved 23 April 2021. Having started his career as an industrial photographer with the Sinclair Oil Corporation, Benton-Harris began studying the following year at Alexey Brodovitch’s influential Design Laboratory classes, with sessions and late-night conversations held by “the Brod” in an off-Broadway automat and at Richard Avedon’s Upper East Side studio. Brodovitch would always stress the importance of self-discovery and remind his students not to imitate others. John Harris is the artist behind the cover painting of dozens of science fiction books. His style is recognizable at a glance - vivid but indistinct, the line work blurred and yet the whole is understood at once. 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?

He wrote for eight years on the landscapes and settlements of the four East Anglia counties and explored them on foot. In 2003 he walked the shores and inland boundaries of the county of Essex with Brian Mooney. The report of the journey, with text by Mooney and illustrations by Harris, was published as Frontier Country (Thorogood 2004). 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. However one of the best parts of his art, whether it is his ongoing multiyear project, or a single one off piece, is his ability to include a narrative. You might not be able to pin point characters but you absolutely know how this civilisation portrayed works, or what emergency is befalling a space station, or the tense negotiations that might be happening in a megastructure on a forgotten planet under a forgotten sky. His is a master at weaving in narrative to his art. In 1963 Benton-Harris received his draft papers for military service. He was posted to San Pedro, California, after basic training, and then to Vicenza, Italy, as a US army photographer. In 1965, he took leave to cover the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in the UK, where he met Jane Gaffney. The couple married the following year and Benton-Harris settled permanently in London, working as a staff photographer for the short-lived London Life magazine, which concentrated on capturing the cool of the swinging 60s. John is a British artist who, inspired by mindfulness, has created stunning sci-fi art since the 1970s. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX magazine issue 112.

Eventually, in 1970, Harris secured new premises for the drawings collection in Portman Square, next to Home House, by James Wyatt (as Eileen discovered) and Robert Adam, the home of the Courtauld Institute. There, in 1972, he opened the Heinz Gallery, an elegant installation designed by Alan Irvine and Stefan Buzás. (The fit-out was happily relocated in 2005 to the Irish Architectural Archive in Merrion Square, Dublin.) Energetic curatorship In 2014, Titan Books published a new collection of his works, entitled Beyond the Horizon; The Art of John Harris.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. 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.