Chris Moore, a British artist who conjured fantastical worlds with high-sheen covers for books by science-fiction masters like Philip Okay. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and Alfred Bester, and who lent his artistry to albums by Rod Stewart and Fleetwood Mac, died on Feb. 7 at his house in Charmouth, on the southwestern coast of England. He was 77.
His spouse, Katie Moore, introduced his dying on his Fb web page. She didn’t cite a trigger.
Making his title with a crisp, airbrushed type that blended the element of picture realism with leaps of creativeness, Mr. Moore was a famend determine within the science fiction world. However you’ll by no means hear that from him.
“Name him a grasp, or a titan in his sphere, and he merely received’t have it,” Stephen Gallagher wrote within the introduction to the e-book “Journeyman: The Artwork of Chris Moore,” a 2000 collaboration with the artist. “Probably the most you’ll ever get out of him is a grudging admission of some quiet satisfaction when one thing in an image comes proper.”
Regardless of his modesty, Mr. Moore supplied memorable interstellar photos for numerous editions of notable books by Mr. Dick — together with his novel “Do Androids Dream of Electrical Sheep?,” the idea of the 1982 movie “Blade Runner” — in addition to works by Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Ursula Okay. Le Guin, H.G. Wells, Alastair Reynolds, J.G. Ballard, Stephen King and plenty of others.
Whereas greatest recognized for his visible journeys via the cosmos, Mr. Moore produced a variety of illustrations. He created the artwork for a number of album covers, together with Fleetwood Mac’s “Penguin” (1973) and Mr. Stewart’s “The Classic Years 1969-70” (1976), in addition to contributing photos to magazines like Omni and Asimov’s Science Fiction. And he designed wallpaper tied to the Star Wars movie “The Empire Strikes Again” (1980).
Whereas he thought of himself extra a craftsman than an artist, Mr. Moore allowed that there was a sure magic concerned in bringing far-off worlds to life.
“The method of making these photos was extra of a journey of discovery than creation,” he mentioned in a 2011 interview with the Crimson Moon Chronicle, a sci-fi and fantasy website. It was if he “had virtually ‘discovered’ the picture,” he mentioned, “prefer it was a mix of some textual content you’d been given and a sequence of completely happy accidents that you just had gone via to reach at this window on the longer term.”
Christopher Norton Moore was born on June 1, 1947, in Rotherham, England, in South Yorkshire.
“I spotted from a really early age what I wished to do, which was nothing to do with high-quality artwork as such,” he mentioned in an interview revealed by Artist Companions, an company that represented him. “A business artist was my ambition from round 3 or 4 years previous.”
He studied graphic design at Maidstone School of Artwork in England earlier than being accepted by the Royal School of Artwork in London, the place he targeted on illustration from 1969 to 1972.
Mr. Moore produced his first e-book cowl in 1972: a reprint of Lawrence Durrell’s 1938 novel, “The Black E-book.” Working with Peter Bennett, the artwork director at Related E-book Publishers, he was quickly illustrating covers for a lot of publications.
“I used to be barely conscious of science fiction” at that time, he mentioned, including, referring to the Stanley Kubrick movie, “I’d seen ‘2001,’ and that was about all.”
That may change when Mr. Moore made his mark with “Extro,” a British version of Mr. Bester’s “The Laptop Connection” (1975).
Along with his spouse, Mr. Moore is survived by his daughter, Georgia Whiting, and his sons, Harry, Robbie and William Moore.
He exhibited his work for the primary time in 1995, on the World Science Fiction Conference in Glasgow, the place he realized that there was a marketplace for his originals, which he started promoting.
Even so, Mr. Moore remained steadfast in avoiding lofty posturing as a high-quality artist. “If somebody desires an image of a horse as an example their new vary of lasagna,” he mentioned within the Company Companions interview, “then I observe the transient and produce an image of an Italian horse.”
