Chris has had a long and successful career, but he is still fired with enthusiasm and the prospect of having an exhibition in Guernsey motivated him to create a new body of work, referencing films such as Dune and Guardians of the Galaxy. He was also inspired by the island in which he was born, as he has been since the beginning of his career.
“Guernsey has always been a big influence on my art. I started working in the island at the age of 17, creating a strip cartoon for the Guernsey Press, and it is with great pleasure that I am able to collate this collection, which effectively covers all the significant years of my commercial life,” he said.
Chris was born soon after the end of World War II, and the German fortifications – almost brand new when Chris began exploring them at the age of seven – made a lasting impression upon him. Despite the warning signs and barbed wire, Chris would make his way into bunkers alone, finding decorations the German soldiers had put up to make them more homely. One of his latest pieces, Stalagmite Quarry, is a homage to Chouet, now a landfill site. “I used to cycle up the road to Chouet and there used to be the most fantastic flooded quarry with a German bunker on the top and I was obsessed with it,” Chris recalled.
Another influence from the island is the quality of the light: “Guernsey light has a dramatic feel; intense blue skies which give a very sharp definition. The intensity of the light throws everything into relief and you can’t really see what’s in the shadows. The shadows just become uniformly dark. You’ve either got light or dark and very little in between.” A further legacy of growing up in Guernsey is Chris’s fascination with fish and sea creatures. “My spaceships quite deliberately evoke certain animals,” he said, citing his concept designs for Alien, Dune and his book covers for Isaac Asimov.
When Chris was growing up, he found science-fiction films “a bit of a joke”, but that changed with Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“It was the first time I’d been really aware of space and the lighting in space. And of course, the brightness of the light was fascinating, and I think that was because of my Guernsey experience with the light here that it meant so much. And that basically started me in science fiction.”
Chris illustrated numerous sci-fi book covers, and became notorious for not reading the books for which he was producing the cover art. In 1975, director Alejandro Jodorowsky was looking for artists to illustrate his Dune script when he came across Chris’s artwork in an art and comic book shop in Paris. Chris was invited to produce concept work for the film in development, which proved to be a life-changing experience. “Alejandro had a directness of vision, and it’s the people who have the vision who end up on the back shelf, and the money men move in and ruin it. Alejandro’s Dune collapsed because the Americans couldn’t get their heads around the concept.”
Work on Flash Gordon, Alien, A.I and Superman followed, and Chris’s love of bright colours was instrumental in him working on Guardians of the Galaxy. Director James Gunn said:
“Yellow is an underused colour in films, especially science-fiction and fantasy films. In Guardians, I used it as a signifier of change, rebirth and redemption… I believe colour is a part of what made Guardians successful. When so many huge spectacle films have the beige colour palette of Saw, the brain becomes thirsty for colour.”
The Guardians art director was taken aback when he discovered Chris’s method of working: “He’d worked on lots of Marvel films and he’d hire these whiz kids, these superstars who did everything generated on computers. I was given this wonderful big room and I just had my pad and a few paintbrushes and the art director came in and he said, ‘Well where’s your computer?’ I said, ‘Well no, I draw,’ and he couldn’t get his head around it, but then all the whiz kids came in and they all shook my hand and they said, ‘Chris you started us off you know, you were our beginning.’”
Chris had mixed emotions when he came into the Art for Guernsey Gallery to see the curated exhibition: “It was amazing to see how it had been put together. I’ve had exhibitions over the years, and the bit that I really like is immediately before it opens when you can sit in a quiet space and you see all your paintings all around you. And they’ve all got memories, because in a really weird way they’re a bit like family, and it’s so strange to see paintings that are so familiar to you in a public space.”
CULTURAL DIPLOMACY
It’s always a thrill to see cultural diplomacy at work. Neil Burkinshaw came to Guernsey from Sheffield especially to see the exhibition. “I found out he was doing an exhibition and I thought, ‘I’ve never been to Guernsey, and if I don’t do it now, I never will.’” he said. “So here I am. It’s fulfilling a bit of wanderlust, to close down the obsession I’ve had with this man for 40 years.” Neil has collected almost all of the books for which Chris has done cover art. “That’s what got me into reading, although I realised pretty quickly that he was drawing his own thing.” Neil was positive about the exhibition:
Even more excitingly, he got to have a long chat with his hero and take him out to dinner.
Marcus Pullen, a computer games developer from Portsmouth, came to Guernsey on his honeymoon 34 years ago, and has returned many times since then. Marcus would love to develop a game with Chris: “His stuff is unique. When you look at so many sci-fi films they all look the same, but his spaceships are always very majestic because his work has this mighty scale, and there’s a sense of population in them because he puts in all this detail. And you rarely see black in his work – the space is beautifully coloured with all these lovely gases and it feels very much alive.” Marcus also got to talk to the man himself, and treated himself to a Guardians of the Galaxy concept sketch.
