Unquiet
Things

 

Ever since we solved the mystery of the Wrinkle in Time cover artist, I’ve been itching to share more of Richard Bober’s work here. His art pulses with an otherworldly luminescence – sometimes veiled by murk and shadow, sometimes blazing in full ethereal splendor.

In his horror work, this shimmer peers through layers of gloom: take his cover for an Alfred Hitchcock collection, where the master of suspense sits at his desk in an eerily shadowed room. The exquisitely blown glass lamps and lanterns suspended from the ceiling cast their glow through a heavy atmospheric haze, while behind him, the stark silhouette of an upraised arm clutching a knife cuts through all that diffused glitter – a perfect contrast of light and shadow, sparkle and threat.

 

 

 

 

This radiance struggles through a different kind of murk in his pulpy sci-fi pieces, wading through cosmic morass and alien atmospheres. But in his more fantastical works, that same light breaks free entirely – illuminating visions of impossible beauty. Take this utterly bizarre bar scene: at first glance, it’s teeming with aliens of every imaginable variety, but look closer, and you’ll find it’s set in what appears to be an old-world gentleman’s club, all dark polished wood and traditional elegance, complete with a figure in a powdered wig – yet overhead hangs a disco ball, transforming this stately space into some kind of interdimensional nightspot.

On the cover of Esther M. Friesner’s Mustapha and His Wise Dog, a dragon is emerging from what can only be described as a posh fantasy spa-castle-pagoda onto a balcony where regal figures blithely recline in a hot tub overlooking an iridescent sea.I have never read the book, and I don’t know what it’s about, so there’s no doubt that my description bears not one iota of relevance to the actual plot!!

Anyway, even his portrait of an orc – traditionally the most brutish of fantasy creatures – finds a balance between that shadowy murk and shimmering dignity. Ugly but make it fashion, as they say.

 

 

 

I discovered these pieces in reverse, really. First came his portrait of an aristocratic vampire lady while I was researching The Art of Darkness – a piece so captivating I desperately tried to include it in the book. Then there was that infamous 1976 Dell/Laurel Leaf paperback cover of A Wrinkle in Time, with its red-eyed specter and improbable winged centaur. That cover had lived in my memory since childhood, and when I began work on The Art of Fantasy, I knew I wanted to include this piece of beautiful nightmare fuel.

But I’d been down this road before – previous searches for the artist’s identity had led only to dead ends. By the time my hunt began again in earnest, my book was already at the printer’s, and my blog post about the mysterious cover artist had exploded across social media.

 

 

 

 

I had no idea then that the two pieces that had independently captured my imagination – the elegant vampire and the cosmic horror of the Wrinkle cover – sprang from the same artistic wellspring. Amid the avalanche of suggestions and theories that poured in during the investigation, there were these quiet, prescient hints – my friend Keith mentioned Bober’s name in my Facebook comments, and on Twitter, Wallace Polsom pointed out those distinctive sickly greens in Bober’s Hitchcock covers.

Adam Rowe of 70’s Sci-Fi Art, whose expertise in this era of illustration is unmatched, lent his considerable knowledge to the investigation. When Endless Thread took up the mystery (a whole story unto itself), their investigation would eventually prove these subtle clues significant, unraveling the threads that connected these works I’d loved for such different reasons.

 

 

While most of Bober’s work focused on the fantastical and the eerie, he occasionally turned his eye to still-life compositions with delightfully macabre results. The cover for 12 Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV showcases a gleefully sinister collection – a bundle of dynamite, a bullet, a scorpion, a bottle of poison, some sort of firearm (a musket? I don’t know guns, okay?), and a skull with a lone eyeball rolling grotesquely in its socket.

It’s a vignette that, as it turns out, hints at an artistic legacy carried forward by his nephew.

 

 

 

 

As noted in the Endless Thread interview, Richard’s nephew Matthew remembers the Wrinkle in Time cover as the first book he had read that his uncle did the cover for, talking about it in school. He would later spend time in his uncle’s basement, where paintings were stored around a pool table, and eventually helped digitize Richard’s slides – an informal archive of work photographed on 35mm film.

But most meaningful were the countless nights spent watching his uncle work: “He would always let me sit there and watch him paint. So, many, many, many, many nights, I got to sit there and just watch him work on a cover or whatever he was working on. So I learned an incredible lot from that — to see the profession, what it meant to be a professional, you know, and just watch that. It’s… I can’t even describe what that meant to me.”

Matthew is an artist himself, and scrolling through his Instagram sends me into absolute paroxysms of demented glee. His hyper-realistic still lifes feel like the most perfect gatherings of misfit treasures – think of those sad little ceramic creatures you sometimes find in thrift stores, the ones with slight chips or haunting expressions that make other people pass them by, the forgotten mechanical toys and vacant-eyed dolls that seem to be asking for someone to take them home and give them new life.

In Matthew’s paintings, these precious oddities come together in the extraordinary gatherings. Porcelain doll heads with empty, searching eyes commune with clay skulls, while owls, bunnies, elephants and the most beautifully unsettling clowns gather for what feels like the coziest of strange tea parties. Wind-up alligators and other odd little mechanical toys peek out from the edges, each one seeming curious and somehow alive, as if caught in the middle of their own secret adventures. He captures every worn edge and chipped surface with such loving attention, transforming these overlooked treasures into something magical through sheer technical precision and an absolutely infectious sense of joy.

Every time I look at one of his pieces, I discover some new detail that makes my greedy little goblin heart do shriekingly clumsy cartwheels of delight.

 

 

Bober was famously private and perhaps a bit of a technophobe – he had no cell phone, no computer, not even long-distance phone service. His agent, Jane Frank, called him a recluse; in nearly 30 years of representing him, she only met him once, often accepting awards on his behalf at conventions while assuring people he wasn’t merely a figment of her imagination.

For a fascinating deep dive into Bober’s artistic philosophy and his complex relationship with tradition and modernity, I highly recommend this illuminating profile from the summer before his passing: Richard Bober: Gift of the Old Masters.

 

 

 

 

What truly enchants me about Bober’s work is its shimmering, glittering quality – a sort of luminous magic that infuses even his darkest artworks. Looking at these pieces, I want to gather up all of Bober’s paintings and stitch them into the most extraordinary ballgown – imagine the sweep of that skirt, each panel flickering between horror and beauty, between the mundane and the cosmic.

The bodice would be crafted from his Hitchcock covers, all those sickly greens and oceanic blues swirling together. The full skirt would be a phantasmagoria of his fantasy works – that hot tub dragon scene forming a shimmering border, while aliens and orcs and vampire aristocrats dance across the fabric.

And there, right at the heart of it, that nightmarish Wrinkle in Time centaur would spread its rainbow wings across the waist, its companion’s red eyes glowing like rubies in the folds of fabric. It would be a gown for a masquerade at the end of the universe, where all of Bober’s creations could finally meet and mingle.

 

 

 

 

 

I harbor this slightly ridiculous dream: that someday, The Art of Fantasy might go into a tenth-anniversary edition. Let’s be real – my books about weird, dark art are probably far too niche (and, I suspect, so far under the radar as to be subterranean) to ever be bestsellers, but wouldn’t it be something if that haunting Wrinkle in Time cover could land among its pages?

Not that it matters much – Bober’s art is out there now, inspiring new generations of readers and artists, no longer anonymous but celebrated for the strange and shimmering legacy it is. Still… a ghoul can dream!

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