In 2010 Harris became a regular contributor to the exhibitions of the Symposium of Imaginative Realism (Illuxcon). Since Harris’ work is imaginative and painted in interesting ways, this work is worth adding to collections of illustration art fans and those of painters in general.”– Art Contrarian

His paintings are absolutely dripping with massive scale, temperature, atmospheric motion, “otherness”, a marriage of the alien and the recognizable, and far future antiquity. He provides a real aged quality to everything he paints. Everything feels old and lived in: ancient ships, xeno-archaeological remnants, etc. He provides just enough detail to spark your imagination, but he leaves the edges blurred, ambiguous and almost out of focus, so you have to fill in the mental blanks yourself. It all has a photographic feel to it, although no one would confuse his painting for photographs. How he manages to do this with a paintbrush is beyond me. It’s like he thinks through a lense and paints it with a brush. Just like reading a story, you meet the artwork halfway with your own imagination and fill in the blanks.

Thematic collections

One of Harris’ best known pieces came from when he was invited by NASA to see an early morning shuttle launch in 1985. Harris remembers trying to photograph the moment of liftoff with his camera. But rather than capture the feeling of excitement, he felt that the lens introduced an unwanted separation between him and the event. It wasn’t until the shuttle took off that he put the camera down and looked at the light and color produced by the launch’s vapor exhaust. Other projects included Americans in Europe, exhibited at the Santa Fe Centre for Photography in 1983; and Children of the Troubles, shot in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. A good selection of his work from England and New York was published in Creative Camera Collection 5 in 1978, and he was supportive in the research for and the making of the 2019 film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay, about the founder of Creative Camera magazine. John is a British artist who, inspired by mindfulness, has created stunning sci-fi art since the 1970s. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX magazine issue 112. This limited edition is presented with an exclusive art print called Shai-Hulud, signed by the John Harris. Harris was born in 1943, in North Staffordshire; he had an itinerant, partly colonial youth. He was educated at Winchester College, where he was a scholar. He began in Architecture at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University in 1961, and finished in Art History.

In 2014, Titan Books published a new collection of his works, entitled Beyond the Horizon; The Art of John Harris. Benton-Harris never retired, living in Croydon, south London, and continuing to shoot pictures and work on book projects until shortly before his death. Rainmaker Entertainment based in Vancouver, hired Harris in 2007, to work on The Weinstein Company's movie, Escape from Planet Earth. [6]John Harris has produced book covers for many science fiction authors including famous names such as John Scalzi, Ben Bova, and Orson Scott Card. In fact, Scalzi himself, calls the artist’s work highly iconic, the phrase he uses is “Bookstore Iconic — which is to say it can be seen from across the bookstore.” (Harris p4) It is bold, striking, intense art that guarantees a good read. John Harris has also illustrated online fiction and produced artwork for NASA. During the early 1980s Harris was commissioned by Sinclair Research to produce cover art for the user manuals of the ZX81, [5] and ZX Spectrum home computers.