The Incredible Umbrella
- THE INCREDIBLE UMBRELLA - An acrylic painting on a 16 x 20 size canvas board. It appears on the cover of, "Fantastic Stories," Jan.1979.
I received this assignment with a note from the editor that read, "There's this guy who has a magic umbrella that takes him to worlds of fantasy fiction where he gets involved with imaginary characters like Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, genies and beautiful harem girls from the Arabian Nights. Things like that. Paint something with those characters in it."
So I did. For some reason that I don't remember now, perhaps it was halloween, I decided to place all those characters around a pumpkin, added a bird on the right side of the pumpkin to balance with the Frankenstein figure on the left side, and put the guy with the magic umbrella inside the pumpkin.
Occassionally, that's how magazine cover commissions came to me. Not with a story manuscript, but simply with a short note outlining a brief idea of what the editor wanted. When I received my copy of this issue of "Fantastic" I saw that the title of the story was "The Pursuit of the Umbrella," by Marvin Kaye. I also learned that the author wrote several other stories about this "magic umbrella," which were collected and published as a book. I never read any of them, so my cover painting is simply a representaton of the basic idea behind the stories, it is not a specific scene from any one of them.
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