Ian Miller's Geometrically-Exact Surrealism

Welcome to The Jewels of Aptor, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's biweekly column on art and the fantastic. Ian Miller would've been cool even if he hadn't worked on Ralph Bakshi's underrated movie Cool World. The UK native has produced a distinctive body of SF artwork over the last thirty years, sometimes pulling collage and photography into his more traditional drawings. Not only did he create an amazing and iconic graphic novel of the brilliant New Wave writer M. John Harrison's The Luck of the Head, he also did covers for such classic magazines as New Worlds and Interzone. Edgy and surreal, Miller combines intelligent geometric exactness with a messy, fluid sense of what it means to be human. More »

Stephan Martiniere: The Future Will Be Bio-Mechanical

Welcome to The Jewels of Aptor, a biweekly column about the intersection of art and the fantastic. Never heard of French artist Stephan Martiniere? Well, you've definitely heard of the projects he's been involved with: Star Wars II and III, The Astronaut's Wife, Red Planet, I, Robot, Virus, and several other SF movies. That's in addition to creative work on videogames, animated projects, TV, and book covers. Even better, he's helped design theme parks like Fantastik Pukoland in Japan (and check out the TVLand theme park production paintings in the gallery below). His credits might be glitzy, but we love Martiniere's art because of its organic feel, the sense of the future being as much biological as mechanical—a trait he shares with French genius Moebius. More »