Beekman, Doug
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Artist.
Working name of American artist Douglas L Beekman (1952- ). After briefly studying at the Columbus College of Art and Design in his home state of Ohio, he grew dissatisfied with the school and moved to New York City to complete his training at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League. He then began painting book covers, mostly for minor publishers; his first noteworthy effort, perhaps, was his cover for a 1977 edition of Philip K Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959), a nice rendering of a Spaceship flying over a barren red landscape with a large moon looming above the horizon. However, seemingly following both the marketplace and his own preferences, Beekman increasingly focused on art for works of Heroic Fantasy, like his cover for Piers Anthony's The Source of Magic (1979) showing a swordsman and a centaur confronting a dragon, and he was especially celebrated for his ability to create strange creatures; his cover for Timothy Zahn's Spinneret (1985), wherein Aliens resembling a bear, a dolphin, a lizard, a crab, a Robot, and a bird gather around a table, might be offered as representative evidence of his skills in that area. But the versatile Beekman could still excel at painting persuasive spacecraft, as observed on the cover of Jerry Pournelle and John F Carr's anthology Imperial Stars, Volume I: The Stars at War (anth 1986).
Beekman worked steadily as a cover artist throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but he was increasingly in demand as a cover artist for Comic books; indeed, his only Spectrum Award honoured his 1996 work for DC Comics's series Shadow of the Bat, and he did a number of covers for Marvel Comics's Conan comics. Like other artists of the era, Beekman has also worked in advertising, painted collectible cards, and staged exhibitions of his works, and in the 1990s he briefly dabbled in a career as an agent representing other artists, including Bob Eggleton and J K Potter. Though far from elderly, he has mostly been inactive in the field since 2002. [GW]
Douglas L Beekman
born Findlay, Ohio: 29 November 1952
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