Jones, Peter
Entry updated 21 August 2023. Tagged: Artist.
(1951- ) UK artist who, ignoring school careers advice to become "a North Sea Trawlerman", enrolled in London's Saint Martin's School of Art, graduating in 1974 and having his first cover art published that year. His Illustrations have the drama of the sf Pulps, with a lively use of colour and intriguing backgrounds – one of his earliest, for Christopher Stasheff's King Kobold (1974), has a futuristic flying trireme tearing across a dramatic landscape. Favouring oil and acrylic paints, Jones' artistic influences are varied, but the strongest is James Bama. He was the winner of the 1981 British Science Fiction Association Award for best artist.
Jones could paint ornamental battling Spaceships, as for the 1975 Mayflower paperback of M John Harrison's The Centauri Device (1974); suitably exotic Monsters and Aliens, such as for the 1978 Hamlyn paperback of Robert Silverberg's The Silent Invaders (1963); and scenes focused on characters engaged in vigorous action or caught in a dramatic pose. The latter often featured sternly-featured males and/or swooning females (see Clichés; Women in SF), but Jones could illustrate strong female characters when required – for example, on Mick Farren's Synaptic Manhunt (1976), though still with a minimalist approach to clothing.
Despite his being fairly prolific – over 150 covers in the first decade – the quality of Jones's cover art was high for several years, with many memorable works. Examples include the 1975 Panther reissues of J G Ballard's Vermilion Sands (1971) and Philip José Farmer's The Fabulous Riverboat (1971); the 1977 Orbit paperback of Tanith Lee's The Storm Lord (1976); Mick Farren's The Neural Atrocity (1977); and the 1979 Corgi reissue of Walter M Miller Jr's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). From about 1980, stand-out covers appeared less often and unremarkable ones increased, possibly because his focus was elsewhere: aside from non-genre interests, he began to provide artwork for Videogames and Gamebooks such as Steve Jackson's and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series, beginning with the first, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982), and Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series. Jones also provided work for related media, such as Games Workshop's White Dwarf magazine. His production of covers for non-games-related sf and fantasy tailed off from the mid-1980s. [SP]
Peter Andrew Jones
born Islington, London: 14 December 1951
works
- Solar Wind (London: Paper Tiger, 1980) [coll: chap: graph: hb/Peter Jones]
links
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