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The Art Of Richard Powers
(2001 - Paper Tiger)

(by Jane Frank) I perceive that Richard Powers gets all the credit for seeing that science-fiction cover illustration would be an ideal mainstream vehicle for Surrealistic art and proving it to editors. He brought into being an iconic wave of such work, which saw other artists follow his lead, but somehow still not quite completely tap into whatever wellspring he had. The 'movement', beloved by some, came, stayed for a healthy period of time, then went. This book is currently the single collection of his paintings and displays less of them than you might expect, because a decision was made that a significant portion of the book needed to be devoted to his biography and a dissection, explication & discussion of the artform and his work, as well as why they indeed seemed so perfect to visually represent the realm of imagination that is this genre. 128 pages in all - 24 pages display 12 paintings spread over the central gutter, all acceptably so, given the non-cohesiveness of the subjects. 43 more feature large reproductions of his work and another 26 gather multiple images together. There are 10 pages given over to a checklist of his book covers and you'll also find a very useful single page index to the works gathered here. Many of the remaining pages of text begrudgingly include some smaller examples as well. The works are captioned with the titles, creation-year, use it was put to (including publisher & author, if a cover), medium, size (traditional & metric), along with the art collection that was its current source.