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Planet of the Apes (From
the
original Penguin paperback book "Monkey Planet")Artist's interview by
Deborah Susan Jones
:
Editor
"La Planète des
singes" or as titled
by Penguin Books in 1985 when it was released (I painted
it in February
1985)
"Monkey Planet", being the Science Fiction novel
by Pierre Boulle
which he wrote in 1963 and on which the well known movie
Planet of The
Apes was based.The movie tells the tale of three
human astronauts from Earth who land on a planet
orbiting the star
Betelgeuse only to discover, later in the scenario, that
it is in fact,
and to the utter horror and surprise of the main
character (played by
Charlton Heston) our own Planet Earth and that humankind
had done a
nasty apocalptic job on the place leaving the Apes not
too surprisingly
a bit resentful towards the humans!It transpires as the story unfolds that the planet is run by great apes who are the dominant race and where humans are now primitives.
I did not create a huge number of
cover paintings for Penguin, as mostly I was involved
with other
publishers such a Futura Publications (the Orbit
imprint) who were more
deeply into expanding the market in the UK for Science
Fiction novels,
but it was a great opportunity to create a cover for
such a well known
movie (as I saw it, because I'd seen the movie but not
read the book
until I was handed it by Penguin's art director).I couldn't wait to get stuck into it
and, as was so often the case when creating covers, I
did a goodly
number of sketches, so called "roughs" as they were
known in the UK
publishing world (or prelins in the USA) even if I was
not asked to do
so. Typically, at this stage of my
carer, I was in fact rarely called upon to do "roughs"
for an art
director before commencing on a piece simply because by
that time W.H.
Smith (who were then arguably the leading book retailer
in the UK) took
the stance that they would "take any book that had a
Peter Jones cover
on it" simply because, apart from the escalation of
sales effected by
my work, it saved the sales reps, who had to traipse
around every
bookshop in the country then, from having to spend time
selling the
book to the shop manager, saving workload they more than
welcomed!
Also, like any other hard working professionals, with
dozens and
sometimes hundreds of other books to get off their desks
by the end of
any one month, art directors were more than happy to
take advantage of
my reputations for both sales increases and deadline
fidelity, indeed,
one leading art director stated quite openly "it means I
can go home
early and do some d.i.y. on the house" and, equallly,
that "I don't
have to worry all weekend whether you are going to show
up on time with
the visual on Monday" (if only because deadline fidelity
was not, on
the whole,
typical in the industry, at least at that time . . . .
.)However, whilst this was also a boon
to me, because as a working illustrator with a mortgage
on my studio
any work that could be avoided that did not directly
make income was
more welcome (because I did not get paid for time spent
doing the
roughs) I nevertheless created "explorative drawings"
for my own
pleasure simply because they were that, a pleasure to
create.However in the case of "Monkey
Planet" since I did not work on a regular basis
for Penguin
I was obliged to produce "a preliminary" and this,
mixed with my
own "explorative drawings" that I did
anyway produced an interesting set of drawings. One of the many paradoxes that did,
and still do, pepper my working process! These, at last, see the light of day
in volume 2 of my Solar Wind anthology series of books,
which I find
"interesting" since it was not on my mind when I did
these drawings at
the time.Anyhow, do enjoy the
"characterisation rough" I've uploadd here." PAJRead more in the book
here!Deborah Susan Jones
Editor
