Acclaimed SFF/Horror artist, Wayne Barlowe, turned sixty-five today. His career now spans five decades and the time seems right for a look back on his body of work.

Here is Barlowe's bio from his own website:

"Wayne Barlowe is a world-renowned science fiction and fantasy author and artist who has created images for books, film and galleries and written novels, screenplays and a number of art books. After attending Cooper Union [NYC], he started his career painting hundreds of paperback covers for all of the major publishers and magazine illustrations for LIFE, TIME and NEWSWEEK. He went on to write and illustrate EXPEDITION, BARLOWE’S GUIDE TO EXTRATERRESTRIALS, BARLOWE’S GUIDE TO FANTASY, BARLOWE’S INFERNO, BRUSHFIRE: Illuminations from the Inferno, THE ALIEN LIFE OF WAYNE BARLOWE and AN ALPHABET OF DINOSAURS. His film designs can be seen in BLADE 2, GALAXY QUEST, BABYLON 5: Thirdspace, TITAN AE, HELLBOY, HELLBOY 2: The Golden Army, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKHABAN, HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE. AVATAR, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, PARADISE LOST, JOHN CARTER, PACIFIC RIM and RIPD. ALIEN PLANET, a Discovery Channel special based on EXPEDITION, for which Barlowe was executive producer, aired in 2005.
His first novel, GOD’S DEMON, was released by Tor Books in 2007. Currently, he has several major film screenplays in development, and the sequel to his first novel, titled THE HEART OF HELL was released in July 2019. 2021 saw the release of his retrospective Hell art book, PSYCHOPOMP."

A longer version can be found here.

Obviously, Wayne has been a busy boy these past five decades. According to his longer bio, Barlowe was born in Glen Cove, New York, the child of two professional natural history artists, Sy and Dorothea Barlowe. By the time he attended Cooper Union in New York City, he had already sold a cover illo to Cosmos magazine. Severely underwhelmed by his art instructors at Cooper Union, Wayne went freelance and never looked back.

Barlowe is a life-long student of paleontology, anthropology and ancient history. He also started reading SFF at an early age. Artistically, beside the early influence of his parents, Wayne grew up loving Howard Pyle and the mystic grandeur of William Blake. When asked a few years ago as to what art/artists impressed him currently, he had this to say:

"I’m fascinated by the late nineteenth century and its fin de siecle artwork. Orientalist and Symbolist painters, particularly. The Orientalists introduced rendering abilities to a nearly unattainable apex. I’m not sure whether anybody can do what they did with paintbrushes anymore. Also, from a certain perspective, the Symbolist movement, with its enigmatic imagery and superbly refined palettes, gives me profound inspiration. To be honest, nothing being produced right this moment pushes buttons in me as do those two schools of art. I can nonetheless look at a Ludwig Deutsch piece or a Khnopff or Hiremy-Hirschl with as much pleasure as I did when I first found them."

After painting numerous book covers--many of them in the heroic fantasy category--Barlowe hit it big in 1979 with Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials. The book featured numerous aliens from various SF authors, each with a Barlowe illo alongside it. The book sold well and won a Locus Award for Best Illustrated Book.

Wayne would continue to do covers both in and outside of SFF for the next fifteen years. In 1990, he published Expedition, an illustrated SF tale that he also wrote the text for. In the early Nineties, Wayne began doing a lot of dinosaur-related projects, culminating with 1995's An Alphabet of Dinosaurs, a young readers book written by paleontologist, Peter Dodson, and lavishly illustrated by Barlowe.

This is where Wayne began tacking back to where he left off with Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials. Barlowe's Guide to Fantasy came out in 1996, featuring the likes of Bran Mak Morn, Corum and Nissifer from Cugel's Saga. It did well and Barlowe decided he preferred doing illustrated books rather than just book covers. He had big plans for his next project. It would be the hallmark of his career.

Barlowe's Inferno--with an introduction by Tanith Lee--was released in 1998 to wide acclaim. I remember looking through it in a downtown Chicago bookstore and being blown away. Nothing quite like it had ever been done before. Wayne had drawn from Milton's Paradise Lost and then added in a whole bunch of stuff straight from his imagination, drawing on his love of paleontology, anthropology and history. The result was something totally new. Barlowe has stated he considers the entire mythos he created around 'Inferno'--which includes two novels so far--to be his crowning achievement.

Meanwhile, as the bio above states, Wayne has been kept quite busy by Hollywood doing concept art for films like Hellboy: The Golden Army and Avatar.

Feel free to check out the gallery below, which I’ve organized in roughly chronological order.