John Berkey is one of the classic painters of the golden era of science fiction. He did some of the original Star Wars posters, but this is for me his best work: Gigantic deep space exploration ships, beautiful white galactic liners, and huge space posts orbiting Earth and other planets—all of them mixing elegant biological shapes with hard edges.
I makes me nostalgic, as I remember looking at his illustrations—along with the art of Chris Foss or Ralph McQuarrie, among others—and trying to emulate him when I was little kid.
I like when some of his art pieces seem to get into abstract territory. At times, his surface treatments seem to almost venture into analytical cubism.
His cinema work
John Berkey was born in Minnesota in August 13, 1932, where he resided for most of his life. He did science fiction and space exploration illustrations for NASA, George Lucas, and hundreds of books. He also painted the famous “Old Elvis Stamp” for the US Postal Service. He died on April 28th, 2008.
You can buy his art in his site.
This is part of a series in which we are featuring really cool industrial design work. If you are an concept or industrial designer with high quality work, please drop me a line here.
