Category: {science fiction}

I was pleased to find a copy of this book recently, a slim volume published in 1978 which isn’t especially rare but which usually sells for much more than the £2 I paid for it. Justin Todd is a British illustrator whose work was a familiar sight on book covers in the 1970s, especially when his commissions weren’t restricted to a single genre. Cover artists who work on fantasy novels are often asked to do horror covers (and vice versa), or edged towards science fiction when the material suits their style; Todd worked on fantasy, horror and the occasional SF title while also providing covers for mainstream novels, offbeat non-fiction, historical fiction and children’s stories. Fully-illustrated children’s books evidently became his main line of work in the 1980s—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, a collaboration with Angela Carter—which would have left him no time for cover commissions. I was amused to find him illustrating crank titles (previously) in the early 70s when he did the paperback cover for one of the great anti-crank books, John Sladek’s The New Apocrypha, a few years later.

The Centre of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (1972) by John C. Lilly.

Todd’s style is easy to recognise once you’ve seen a few examples: meticulous gouache renderings that tend to be slightly naive even when they’re depicting a wholly realistic story like Treasure Island. Gouache is a water-based paint that’s useful when you want a flat, even finish, but it doesn’t give you the depth of colour or contrast provided by oils or acrylics. Todd’s paintings embrace the limitations of the medium, with gradients and shadings that are so soft and diffused they might be taken at first for pencil drawings.

The Journey to the East (1972) by Herman Hesse.

The Magical Paintings of Justin Todd isn’t a comprehensive study of Todd’s illustration work, more a snapshot of a career in progress. In addition to 64 full-page reproductions there’s a two-page interview by editor and art director Mike Dempsey which provides valuable biographical details. I was pleased to find that many of the cover paintings were ones I hadn’t seen before, including a few Arcimboldo-like faces. Todd had a flair for this kind of visual invention, constructing faces or even whole figures out of disparate objects. I’ve had a copy of The Journey to the East for many years but until this week I don’t think I’d ever looked closely at all the tiny figures making up the central figure that strides across the landscape.

Mike Dempsey maintains a blog which includes a reminiscence of working with Justin Todd.

Stories of Five Decades (1972) by Herman Hesse.

Secret Places of the Lion (1973) by George Hunt Williamson.

Continue reading “The art of Justin Todd”