Paper Tiger's Chris Foss books
   Diary Of A Spaceperson
   The Chris Foss Portfolio   [-BELOW THE LINE-]
                                                                  (Paper Tiger)

Diary Of A Spaceperson (1990) A sci-fi 'story' woven in among an artbook. The text, in diary form, isn't particularly graphic or explicit, but is from the viewpoint of a female addict of a futuristic drug who has no compunction against using her body's currency, when necessary, to garner more of the drug or try to otherwise improve her usually worsening planet-hopping situation - in addition, her encounters with other humans and aliens are frequently not by her choice. So throughout the book, there's any number of pencil-drawings of her, and other women she meets, and their tops are always either absent, or very revealingly draped. There's a few instances of full-nudity and among all these depictions, given the story situations, there's a mild bit of salaciousness. You'll find well-presented pencil-drawings of technology and landscapes, but more than anything else, this book is a good collection of Foss's paintings. 21 of them get nice large reproductions with another 17 full-bleed pages. And then another 26 are even larger, spreading over two pages, and because the book opens pretty flat, only one or two suffer from the gutter-split. Of course, because of this format, there is no captioning or source-info from what the artworks were originally illustrating.

The Chris Foss Portfolio [-BELOW THE LINE-] (1990) A too tall book with too few well-presented works. 16.5 by 11.5 inches makes it ungainly to just sit and relax with, but reproductions are bright and clear. 14 of the pieces, half of the art, are longer than they are tall, so they are all rotated, necessitating holding the book up sideways to view them. If not for that, this collection would have squeaked up onto The List. The 28 pieces are all full-bleed and I imagine any of them would look wonderful extracted from the book, matted and framed, but I don't see this billed anywhere as a poster book for that function. On the page behind each piece is a caption with just title and creation year. The five page text section is an introduction to the artist. The cover is also a different piece than those contained within. The book also seems to be known as simply "Portfolio (The Portfolio Collection) by Chris Foss"