Fowke, Bob
Entry updated 11 January 2024. Tagged: Artist.
(1950- ) UK artist, author and playwright who studied Illustration at Taunton College of Art. He worked mainly in gouache, acrylics, and oil paint, sometimes using acrylics as a base for oil and sometimes painting purely in acrylic or gouache. Early influences included such Renaissance painters as Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and Lucas Cranach (1472-1553). Fowke began to publish work of genre interest in 1973 with paperback covers for reissues in the UK Corgi SF Collector's Library of The Golden Apples of the Sun (coll 1953; cut 1953) by Ray Bradbury and Earth Abides (1949) by George R Stewart. Further paperback covers followed, for Coronet, Methuen's Magnum imprint, Orbit, Pan, Sphere, Tandem and others; one striking design was for the 1978 Pan edition of Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex (1977; vt The Perfect Lover 1977). Four interiors appeared in the large-format, art-heavy UK magazine Science Fiction Monthly in 1974. His regular appearances on book covers continued until 1990.
More recently, since the late 1980s, Fowke has published much nonfiction for children, illustrated by himself and by others; some are bylined Robert Fowke or Kipchak Johnson. The Spaceship Earth sequence, beginning with Worm's Eye View! Make Your Own Wild Life Park (1990 chap) as by Kipchak Johnson, focuses on Ecology and the environment, with the first book winning the Copus Children's Book Prize. [DRL]
Robert Greg Fowke
born Bognor Regis, Sussex: 24 July 1950
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