Illustration Art Gallery

The very best from the wide, sometimes overlooked, world of illustration art, including original artwork for book illustrations and covers, comic books and comic strips, graphic novels, magazines, film animation cels, newspaper strips, poster art, album covers, plus superb fine art reproductions and high quality art prints.

Our gallery brings together artists from all over the world and from many backgrounds, including fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, education, sport, history, nature, technology, humour, glamour, architecture, film & tv, whimsy, even political satire and caricature.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

David Bergen

Although a popular fantasy artist in the 1990s, almost nothing is known about David Bergen's career. He was active in the 1970s, illustrating Sphere's H. G. Wells' reprints and the cover for SF Digest (1976), as well as books by Arthur C. Clarke and Samuel R. Delaney. He illustrated See Inside a Space Station by Robin Kerrod (Hutchinson, 1977) and an illustration appeared in The Flights of Icarus (Paper Tiger, 1977). Soon after, he could be found contributing covers to DAW Books in the USA (e.g. Barrington J. Bayley's Star Winds and E. C. Tubb's Incident on Ath, both 1978).

Bergen then seemed to disappear until 1990 when his work began appearing on various Pan fantasy and SF titles as well as the Puffin editions of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series. He continued to produce covers until at least 1997 when his work again disappears from sight.

What other areas he was (presumably) active in I have no idea; perhaps the lack of credits in the 1980s is literally down to the lack of credits that appeared on books. There can be no doubt as to the quality of his work and he was twice nominated (1991, 1992) for the World Fantasy Award.

Personal information on the artist is almost zero. I believe he was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1947 but a search of the internet turns up nothing else (and any search is rather confused thanks to there being a Canadian author (born 1957) of the same name).

Examples of David Bergen's artwork can be found for sale at the Illustration Art Gallery.

2 comments:

  1. He was actually born in Perth, Australia but lives in Gouda, Netherlands. He's on facebook.

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  2. He also seems to have done concept work and backgrounds for this advert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHxIQyXEvAk

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