The Art of John Harris – Beyond the Horizon

The Art of John Harris: Beyond the Horizon

Published by Titan Books, May 2014

Hardback

160 pages

ISBN: 978 178 116 8424

Review by Mark Yon.

In these days of ‘less is more’, where book cover imagery appears to be a fading art, there aren’t many artists whose style is immediately recognisable. I’m pleased to say that despite this trend, John Harris is one of those – an artist who thinks big and makes big

But first – I suspect there’s a lot of people who may know John’s work without necessarily knowing the artist’s name, whilst there are others who recognise his efforts as something rather special.

So… just for reference, let me see. Looking around at the many books in Hobbit Towers near where I’m sitting, I recognise John Scalzi’s covers for TOR (Zoe’s Tale, The Last Colony, Old Man’s War, The Human Division) in here, so too some Ben Bova covers, an Arthur C Clarke collection, Larry Niven’s Ringworld Throne, Orson Scott Card’s Ender in Exile. James White’s Sector General space hospital books are over there, and Jack McDevitt’s Seeker there – all Harris covers.

When I was younger, it was such images that inspired me to read SF.  It is no surprise that the sense of wonder evoked by such images made me want to read about the worlds contained therein. Huge built items, often ruined, they created images that I wanted to know more about – who had created these buildings, and why? What sort of place was it where such things existed? And where are the people now?

Putting it simply, John has this knack of drawing things through acrylics and watercolours that are BIG. Huge slabs of multi-layered and many faceted cityscapes, ginormous satellite dishes, super-tall towers in starlight, vistas where people are mere dots in a landscape of HUGE proportions, often to a background of variegated stellar dust and galactic-sized nebulae. Generally people are out of sight. It’s rather like thinking ‘Star Wars Destroyer’ and then multiplying in scale by a thousand.

As if the artwork wasn’t enough, the book’s nicely complimented by a lovely John Scalzi introduction (did you know that John H’s artwork inspired John S’s writing of a novel at one point? All explained here.)

There’s also some great explanation from the artist himself about his work. It’s often about entropy, evidently, that such giant-sized objects are often shown deserted and empty. There exists melancholy, yet also beauty. The most impressive of these is a series of paintings created over thirty years or more (and still ongoing) about an alternative world, a sort of travelogue based on a creation inside John’s head – as he puts it, ‘a place that no-one but this artist has seen, my own Shangri-la.’   We have city walls, the size of which would put George RR Martin to shame (and drawn a while before Game of Thrones), volcanoes, strange plants, geothermal stations, nomadic pastoralism fused with ancient and decaying technologies.  It’s a world worth looking at.

Of a different style is the section showing John’s textured art from the NASA event, The Secret History of the Earth in 1985, for which John was commissioned to create images with contrasting textures.  These look rather like satellite pictures from space of different terrains – mountainous, dusty, gritty. Technically clever, they are not what I expected, although they are clearly important to John, judging by his comments.

I also appreciated at the back of the book collections of paintings for four specific authors, who John has created an image for – Ben Bova’s Grand Tour novels in the US, John Scalzi’s (already mentioned above) Orson Scott Card’s Ender novels and Jack McDevitt’s Hutch novels  (ditto).

If I had a complaint it would be that occasionally some of these large paintings have been reduced to a size that diminishes their overall impact, but that is really a minor quibble.

In summary, The Art of John Harris is a lovely collection of epic stuff – it is worthy of your perusal.

Mark Yon, May 2014.

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