Amazing, March 1987
- AMAZING, MARCH 1987 - An acrylic painting on a 16 x 20 size canvas board.
This cover reminds me of the long ago times when I was a young man who would stand at magazine racks in candy stores looking for SF magazines to buy. I always anticipated seeing wonderful cover art on the new issues, but sometimes I was really disappointed. I remember looking at the cover of the January, 1950 issue of "Astounding SF," it featured a hairy hand reaching into space. It was so ugly I thought about tearing it off. At another time I picked up the April, 1961 issue of the "Magazine of Fantasy & SF". It featured a half peeled banana floating in space on the cover. How on Earth could the editors of these two magazines think that that cover art would attract and entice me, or anyone else for that matter, to want to buy the magazine?
I've always thought that a magazine cover should not only feature artwork designed to attract readers, it should have a quality high enough that someone would want to buy the original artwork, or at least a copy of it to frame and hang on a wall in their home. I recently spent some time browsing through my collection of SF and fantasy magazines dating back to the 1940s, and I'm pleased to see that very few of the covers are as unattractive as the covers I described above. And while browsing I was once again treated to the wonderful artwork of Virgil Finlay, Rudolph Belarski, Baumhofer, Rozen, Bergey, Hannes Bok, Edd Cartier, Kelly Freas, Ed Emshwiller, R.G. Jones, Lawrence, Hubert Rogers, and others.
When the editor asked me to paint an Octopus writing on the wall of a cavern beneath the sea, I was not very happy because I relied on the sales of my original paintings and drawings to beef up my total income. I didn't think my usual clients would be interested in an octopus painting. But, I was wrong, I sold it soon after the magazine was published.
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