(John Berkey in his studio.)

Sadly, this last week on April 29th, 2008-the master artist has left us. He was 75. He leaves behind a stunning lifetime of work. John will perhaps be best known for his fantastic depiction's of outer space scenes and spaceships. But, space was just one facet to his amazing ability and talent.

I had the good fortune to get to know John personally back in 1992 while I was an art student. He was kind enough to relate to me on the artistic and even somewhat personal level. He also took on being a kind of 'spiritual' mentor to a few art student friends of mine and I, by allowing us to visit him at his home studio off and on over the last 15 years. He was a very kind and soft spoken man who had a clever sense of humor when speaking about life and some of the various jobs he'd been commissioned to do over the years. I was somewhat shocked when he agreed to act as my senior thesis advisor and even came out to my art college in St. Paul, MN on my behalf for my final presentation. I was humbled, honored and certainly not worthy. However, I was very grateful as that meant a great deal to me. In my mind he was an iconic, heroic artist type figure and just a plain 'ole nice guy to boot. The caliber of talent and ability that every aspiring illustrator wishes they could be just a fraction of! He was extremely nice to me and my fellow artist friends and I doubt we will ever forget it. So, here I will try to do my best to pay homage to John and his amazing career with a brief history (and a few personal anecdotes thrown in as well.)

* * *

John Berkey: A brief History

Born in Edgeley, North Dakota in 1932 Berkey's family moved to Excelsior, Minnesota some short years later. At a young age Berkey knew what he wanted to do and that was paint pictures like the great illustrators from the golden age of illustration; Pyle, Wyeth and Rockwell. He got his start around jr. high running errands and doing paste up's for some of the major art studios in town and from there his talent was quickly recognized. In 1955 Berkey went to work full time for Brown & Bigelow in St. Paul, MN, the largest calendar company in the world. They employed several artists to paint images for a wide variety of calendars as well as purchased a large volume of work from some of the greatest artists of the time including Maxfield Parish, John Clymer, Charles Russell, Norman Rockwell and many others. During this time Berkey worked on a huge variety of subjects from landscapes to the historical. The basic tasks we're simple: to research and then formulate it into a picture. For the next 10 years Berkey would produce about 500 calendar illustrations and master his skills with brushes and paints.

In 1963 Berkey decided to leave Brown & Bigelow and work from his home in Excelsior, MN as a freelance artist. His calendar work continued for B & B but, other avenues began to open up as he started doing a lot of work for magazines, book covers and Hollywood movie posters. Some of his clientele' included: TV Guide, Life Magazine, National Geographic, Sports Afield, Newsweek, Time, Omni, Discover, Goodhouse Keeping, General Motors, Popular Mechanics, Tor Books, The U.S. Postal Service, 3M, Paramount Pictures, Honeywell, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, Doubleday Books, IBM, Playboy Magazine, Road & Track, CBS, DELL, Eddie Bauer, and Lucasfilm Ltd. to name only a few. (The list could go on and on.)

Some of Berkey's most notable work were poster artwork for some of the biggest movies of the 70's -80's. Back in 1975 George Lucas himself personally called Berkey at his home studio and commissioned him to do several paintings to be used as the visual background to try to get a movie studio interested in funding Star Wars. It is thought that the Death Star was directly inspired by a mechanical planet depicted by Berkey in one of his own personal science fiction paintings that Mr. Lucas happened to be interested in. Unfortunately, due to a law suit related to work Berkey had done for the 1977 Battlestar Galactica T.V. series and Star Wars simultaneously, he had to legally drop out of doing any more work for either clients. The lawsuit was not directed at Berkey himself but, between the studios backing Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica over the stealing of visual ideas and conceptual similarities between the two films. After it was all said and done, John had still produced several paintings that currently now sit in the Lucasfilm archives. The most widely used images he did for Lucas we're what would become the book cover for the 1977 Star Wars novelization. More recently in 2006 when Lucasfilm re -released the original trilogy on DVD, Berkey's paintings we're again used on all the insert chapter listings. Other noteworthy film work of his included the movie posters for: The Towering Inferno, Orca, King Kong and Star Trek.

He was actually commissioned to paint all six movie posters for The Star Trek original series films. But, for some reason Paramount had another artist duplicate (almost exactly) each one of Berkey's paintings in a softer, more airbrushed style. By the time Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country came out and Berkey realized that Paramount had not once yet directly used his original work but, again had it duplicated by the same airbrush artist. Berkey told me something to the effect of, ' If Star Trek ever calls again, I probably won't return the call.'

Perhaps the most well known movie poster image he's created (aside from Star Wars and Star Trek) was the 1977 remake of King Kong. That image of Kong straddling the twin towers of the World Trade Center was almost instantly iconic. It was used not only as the films poster but, was printed on coffee mugs, bed sheets, t -shirts, notebooks and was even turned into a gigantic 40 foot cut out display outside some major shopping malls around the nation as the center piece of one of the biggest movie marketing campaigns ever. It has also been rumored that those King Kong paintings Berkey did were some the highest (in dollar amounts) ever paid to an artist for commissioned film poster work. (Not sure about the exact numbers but, I'm guessing it was substantial.) Berkey had definitely arrived in the illustration world as one of the most sought after talents for commercial artwork.

Another of his many career highlights was his ongoing work for the United States Postal Service on 12 different official U.S. postage stamps. These ranged from 5 different yearly Santa Clause stamps, The Klondike Goldrush, The California Gold Rush, and several portraits for a Rhythm & Blues series featuring, Dinah Washington, Clyde Mc Phatter, Otis Retting AND the somewhat contriversial older, vegas era Elvis Presley stamp.

From the mid 1980's through the 2000's Berkey was producing all kinds of artwork for all kinds of clients. He had also become known as one of the greatest science fiction artists in the business. Solidifying this title with hundreds of sci -fi paper back book covers, several sci -fi movie posters, countless magazine illustrations depicting all kinds of futuristic scenes and even delving into what I call 'science fiction expressionism', taking the themes of space and bringing it into the realm of modernistic abstraction.

Upon one visit to his studio in the late 90's, we we're somewhat surprised when John invited us in and then said that he had to go out to talk to a neighbor for a few minutes but, told us we could go ahead a shuffle through any of the (hundred some) paintings that we're stacked about his studio if we liked. John was probably only gone for like 15 minutes but, we had a blast looking (as quickly as we could) at the huge range of subject matter he had depicted in all these paintings. Each one we flipped over was just as good or better as the previous. We then began to notice a stack of work that was a series of female nude model studies. These blew me away! They had that John Singer Sergeant luminosity to them. I don't know why they surprised me so, (and it shouldn't have I guess, as every great artist at one time or another feels compelled to study/ render the human form.) But, these nudes he had done really looked like the classic, timeless fine art images that we art students we're getting exposed to in art history class. At any rate, when John came back down, I told him how impressed I was with those figurative works. His response was something like, 'yeah, it's not all just spaceships and planets over here... we pretty much paint it all.' (Followed by a wink and a warm chuckle.)

We had a great visit with John on that day. Like most visits, we relaxed in his basement studio & talked for hours, as ambient sounds of nature we're piped in from out side microphones (from the woods behind his house) that blended with this ethereal sounding music he had looping in the background. It was like being in another world. Having a few laughs as he'd tell us a little about what ever picture he was currently working on and what he'd been up to recently (illustration wise.) We'd ask him questions and he'd gladly answer them, most often with a story or two. A few times he even showed us his paint mixing area where he formulated all his own paints. Through years of experimantation in trying to arrive at the perfect paint concoction, he said he'd tried mixing just about anything with pure pigment to see if it can work as a medium. He told us that 'if you can eat it or put it in your hair, chances are you can probably paint with it.' needless to say, it was ALWAYS a fascinating experience to head over to his studio for a visit.

Another observation that I'd made about John was that he never appeared to give off any sort of ego. Never acted like he was great or anything, just spoke to us very matter of factly about what he did. I've wondered if maybe he just knew that he was in a completely different plane of artistic greatness, so above and beyond the rest of us in terms of brilliance, that he figured there was just no need to act cocky about anything -as he was totally un -catchable. Or, maybe that was just not in his personality to act that way. Mastery and supreme confidence equals: no need for arrogance I guess!

I remember once he was showing us a painting of a kid in a garage admiring a fancy sports car, all shiny and new looking. The garage was extremely detailed right down to the bolts in the hinges on the garage. And being the novice art student that I was at the time, I asked him something like, 'so, did you go out and take a bunch of photo's of the car, the garage and get a kid to pose just right, to use as a reference to paint this picture from?' He paused for a second and then and looked at me with a half smile and said, 'well I think I know what a car inside of an old garage should look like.' Ha ha! He winged it, -and did so (from what I've been told, on many of his photo realistic looking paintings.) That amazed me. Most artists (myself included) try to gather as much visual reference as possible to make the picture look correct and accurate. But, Berkey was such a visionary that he could simply' make stuff up and have it come off as completely realistic. AMAZING!

In 2004 Berkey received the highly prestigious honor of being inducted into the Society of Illustrators hall of fame. That is probably one of the greatest honors that an illustrator can receive. His paintings now hang amongst the other great masters of our century such as; Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Dean Cornwell, Harold Von Schmidt, Maxfield Parrish, James Montgomery Flagg, J. C. Leyendecker, Frederick Remington, and Frank Frazetta to name just a few. Now that is some good company to keep. I only wonder why it took the S.o.S. so long to induct him?! I was told that John was able to go out to the Society of Illustrators in New York and receive this great honor in person. I'm sure it meant a lot to him to be recognized like that after all these years.

It was also around this time I'd heard (through a mutual friend of John's son), that John had been having some possibly serious health problems. I was sorry to hear this and really wanted to give John a call and wish him well. But, I decided not to bother him and his family during this potentially difficult time (thinking that I'll ring him up once I hear that he's feeling a bit better.)

Half a year or so went by and this same mutual friend told me that John was in fact doing better and was going to be making an appearance at a gallery showing of his work in Northfield, MN in mid November of 2005. Needless to say I was there for that occasion and it turned out to be a great night. It was awesome to finally see all the different subjects he'd painted over the years framed, matted and presented in one room. After making a few rounds in the gallery, I went up to John to say, 'hello' and asked if he remembered me -and he did! (It had been 3 years or so since I'd called him last so, I was not sure if he would). I congratulated him on the Society of Illustrators induction and the wonderful show that night. He had a lot of people coming up to him wanting to talk so, I made my visit brief. He shook my hand and thanked me for coming and said to give him a call sometime soon. Regretfully though, that was the last time I spoke with John.

In retrospect, I am glad that I was in attendance that night. What an amazing talent and what nice guy. There we're ton's of people there all bustling about marveling the same way I do when I look at his work. I overheard the curator of the show tell someone that this was the first official solo gallery showing of John's work. I found that hard to believe for some reason. But, in any event I hope It was a great night for John. He seemed to be getting a good reception and enjoying talking with his many friends, family and fans.

In Closing:

His work had a unique style and look to it (that I for one can now spot a mile away.) From all that I have learned about him, I have concluded that he had done what most of us artists types hope to do in life, tap into that something that compells us to stay excited, interested and passionate about our work. Find that one thing that we love to do and spend our lives mastering it. He was absolutely brilliant when It came to color, lighting, form and composition. His science fiction scenes have helped shape our vision of what space exploration is like in both fantasy and reality. He had the rare ability to be an impressionist, abstractionist and a realist all at the same time. Convincing us all that the fantasticly futuristic might well be just around the corner -flying towards us at lightspeed! It didn't matter if it was a portrait of a famous person for a stamp, a historical landscape or his signature space scenes, Berkey painted each and every one with equal command. John Berkey had mastered his art.

I feel fortunate that I was able to meet and get to know John a bit over the years. Maybe I was not worthy. But luckily for me, his immense talent seemed to only be matched by his kindness toward anyone who was interested in the sort of work he did. He was an inspiration not only to myself, but to a lot of artists out there whom had come in contact with him over the years. I will likely never forget some of those late afternoons spent with him in his studio, as my college friends and I sat there talking to him, gazing in awe at the current work in progress on his drawing board -feeling like we had somehow made it into the inner sanctum of greatness and all we had to do was sit there and soak it all up and it would magically make us great to! Well, it did inspire us to head back to our drawing boards and give it our best. What an amazing guy. He will be missed.

* * *

John Berkey