Harman, Dominic
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Artist.
(1974- ) UK illustrator, active from around 1997, who deftly combines traditional techniques and digital technologies to produce a wide range of work, some of it no more than competently commercial, but much of it conveying an oneiric Sense of Wonder, usually through exorbitant but strictly controlled fantasy/sf landscapes and settings. His work as a whole has clearly been influenced by an extensive understanding of art in the Western world; his best illustrations have a sense of learnedness: there seem to be no mistakes.
Conventional work, which sometimes bears resemblance to the examples of artists like Frank Frazetta, Kelly Freas or Boris Vallejo and others, tends to focus on iconic (or iconicized) figures, often in combat mode, and on Space Opera gear, including Spaceships and the occasional Macrostructure. His darker work, dark literally through a frequent recourse to chiaroscuro, hearkens back as far as Caravaggio or Rembrandt, though the influence of modern workers, like Paul Lehr and Stephan Martinière, can also be registered.
Authors or editors for whom he has done covers include Tony Ballantyne, Keith Brooke, Eric Brown, George R R Martin, Terry Pratchett, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jonathan Strahan, Ian Whates, and others. Three of his cover images, including two for Interzone, have won British Science Fiction Association Awards for best artwork. [JC]
see also: Absolute Magnitude.
Dominic Emile Harman
born 8 August 1974
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