British artist Chris Moore, "who conjured fantastical worlds with high-sheen covers for books by science-fiction masters like Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and Alfred Bester, and who lent his artistry to albums by Rod Stewart and Fleetwood Mac," died February 7, the New York Times reported. He was 77.
"Call him a master, or a titan in his sphere, and he simply won't have it," Stephen Gallagher wrote in the introduction to the book Journeyman: The Art of Chris Moore (2000). "The most you'll ever get out of him is a grudging admission of some quiet satisfaction when something in a picture comes right."
Moore provided images for various editions of notable books by Dick, including his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as well as works by Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, H.G. Wells, Alastair Reynolds, J.G. Ballard, Stephen King, and many others.
He created the art for several album covers, including Fleetwood Mac's Penguin and Stewart's The Vintage Years 1969-70, as well as contributing images to magazines like Omni and Asimov's Science Fiction. He also designed wallpaper tied to the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
"While he considered himself more a craftsman than an artist," Moore conceded "there was a certain magic involved in bringing far-off worlds to life," the Times wrote.
"The process of creating these images was more of a journey of discovery than creation," he said in a 2011 interview with the Red Moon Chronicle, adding that it was as if he "had almost 'found' the image, like it was a combination of some text you'd been given and a series of happy accidents that you had gone through to arrive at this window on the future."
Moore knew what his life's mission was when he was still a child. "I realized from a very early age what I wanted to do, which was nothing to do with fine art as such," he said in an interview published by Artist Partners, an agency that represented him. "A commercial artist was my ambition from around 3 or 4 years old."
Moore produced his first book cover in 1972: a reprint of Lawrence Durrell's 1938 novel, The Black Book. Working with Peter Bennett, the art director at Associated Book Publishers, he was soon illustrating covers for many publications, but admitted he "was barely aware of science fiction" at that point. This all changed with Extro, a British edition of Bester's The Computer Connection (1975).
Moore exhibited his work for the first time in 1995, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow.