Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the passing of Lee Brown Coye. He was a truly unique artist, contributing covers to the original run of Weird Tales and, later, Arkham House and Carcosa.

Time is short, so I'll let the Syracuse University website tell the tale:

'Lee Brown Coye was born in Syracuse, New York, and as a young man lived in nearby Tully. He spent his entire life in the Central New York area. He and his wife, Ruth, lived in Syracuse for many years where Coye's activities included teaching adult art classes; working under the Works Progress Administration to paint a mural in the Cazenovia High School in 1934 (since destroyed); advertising for the WSYR Broadcasting System; producing a variety of commissioned works; and pursuing his own interests as an artist.
The Coyes settled in Hamilton, New York, in 1959 when Lee went to work for Sculptura, a small company that reproduced antique sculptures. The move to Hamilton allowed Coye to fulfill his ambition of returning to a small town and maintaining his own art studio. Coye was a self-taught artist whose entire life was devoted to art-related work. As a young man, he attended one semester of night art classes, but his artistic knowledge and abilities came from many years of work and a thorough study of nature. His astute knowledge of the human body developed from his studies of anatomy and his work as a medical illustrator. He attended operations and autopsies and thus became extremely familiar with the human body assembled or not.'

Lee would go on to do covers for Short Stories and Weird Tales in the '40s, both under the editorship of Dorothy McIlwraith. That is my favorite period of Coye's career. Unlike some, I prefer his painted covers, which remind me of the work of his WT contemporary, Dolgov. Coye would later do line-work covers for Arkham House and Karl Edward Wagner's Carcosa imprint.

Beyond his artwork, Lee would inspire one of the great horror tales of the last half-century, Wagner's 'Sticks'. Apparently, Coye told KEW some version of this tale:

'One recurring feature in Coye's work is the motif of wooden sticks. In 1938, Coye returned to the North Pitcher, New York, area where he spent much of his childhood. It was there, deep in the woods, that Coye first came into contact with these sticks. His walk led him to an abandoned farmhouse. Boards and pieces of wood which had been set perpendicular to one another surrounded the site. Neither inside nor out could Coye find an explanation for the presence of these crossed sticks. In the years following, Coye remained interested in the significance of his discovery, but when he returned to the site in 1963, there was nothing left of the building or the sticks, and he never found out why the sticks were there or who it was that had arranged them in such a manner. Because of the strangeness of the entire experience, these forms never left Coye, and they appear in many of his paintings and illustrations.'

While serious doubt has been cast upon the dates and inspirations in Coye's story, that detracts nothing from what he sparked in Wagner.

Shadowridge Press recently reprinted the Coye cover and illos from Carcosa's Worse Things Waiting in their new edition. Lee Brown Coye's influence lives on.

Feel free to check out the gallery of Coye art below.