Lee, Pamela
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Artist.
(1949- ) American artist. After growing up on the campus of the University of Iowa, Lee moved with her family to Arizona when she was twelve; upon graduating from the University of Arizona in 1970, she moved to California to work in advertising before an assignment obtained through artist William K Hartmann introduced her to space art, which quickly became her specialty. One typical example of her work in this area would be her cover for the art book she produced with Hartmann and Ron Miller, Out of the Cradle: Exploring the Frontiers Beyond Earth (graph anth 1984), which showed tiny astronauts on an array of translucent panels orbiting a cloud-covered Earth.
However, in addition to her participation in the NASA Art Program and other space-related projects, Lee also painted occasional covers for sf novels during the 1980s and 1990s. Some of these were totally in keeping with her usual style, like her cover for Ben Bova's Mars (1992), also marketed as a limited edition print, wherein astronauts stand near a wheeled vehicle and survey the bleak, reddish Martian terrain. But other efforts displayed a broader range of her talents, like her cover for Blood of the Tiger (1987) by Rose Estes (1940- ), foregrounding a prehistoric man gesturing toward a stormy sea while accompanied by a sabre-toothed tiger. Still, most of her later assignments did relate to her interest in Space Flight, including three covers for books by Gregory Benford; her stark lunar landscape with domed enclosures for John M Ford's Growing Up Weightless (1993); and her cover for Tricia Sullivan's Dreaming in Smoke (1998), featuring an enormous, saucer-shaped spacecraft eerily lit from below, which was nominated for a Chesley Award. Since 1998, she has apparently done no further work in sf. [GW]
Pamela Lee
born 1949
works
- Out of the Cradle: Exploring the Frontiers Beyond Earth (New York: Workman Publishing, 1984) [graph: with Ron Miller and William K Hartmann: pb/Pamela Lee]
links
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