Jainschigg, Nicholas
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Artist.
(1961- ) American artist who also publishes as Nick Jainschigg. Before deciding on an artistic career, the young Jainschigg seriously considered becoming a palaeontologist, an interest still reflected in occasional assignments to provide museums with scientifically accurate images of prehistoric animals; he contributed similar artwork to "Extinction" (2006), an episode of the documentary series Naked Science. After receiving a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1983, he began doing interior art for Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and he was soon accepting similar assignments for Amazing Stories and Analog. He painted his first cover for the September 1987 issue of Analog, and in 1989 he began doing book covers with a playfully bizarre cover for Joan Slonczewski's The Wall Around Eden (1989), wherein floating eyes and a dodecahedral blue insect accompany a deer in a bucolic setting. Creative juxtapositions of ordinary humans and strange creatures also distinguished Jainschigg's covers for Helen Collins's Mutagenesis (1993), Hanovi Braddock's Ashes of the Sun (1996), and the October 1992 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, illustrating Jack Dann's "Jumping the Road".
As he gradually built his reputation, Jainschigg was given the 1993 Jack Gaughan Award as an emerging artist and received Chesley Award nominations for his cover paintings for the June 1989 issue of Asimov's (showing two men studying the spectral image of a Don Quixote-like knight) and for the March 1991 issue of Analog (featuring a cowboy who is herding birdlike dinosaurs). However, while he continued to paint numerous book and magazine covers in the 1990s, Jainschigg was also pursuing new interests in art for card games, fine art, and digital art, and he was increasingly involved in teaching at his alma mater, the Rhode Island College of Design, where he became a full-time faculty member in 2000 and is now serving as an Associate Professor. Evidently preoccupied with these and other activities, he has done no genre work since 2008. [GW]
Nicholas E Jainschigg
born New York City, New York: 5 December 1961
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