"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
ABOVE: Jon Jay Muth, "Pursuit," Epic Illustrated #12 (June 1982), page 32.
ABOVE: Jon Jay Muth, "Pursuit," Epic Illustrated #12 (June 1982), page 33.
ABOVE: Jon Jay Muth, "Pursuit," Epic Illustrated #12 (June 1982), page 34.
Rightly or wrongly, I have long thought of Muth’s style at the beginning his career, when he drew the above stories, as “School of Jeffrey Jones.” There are, however, definite similarities between Muth’s painting style and palette and Alan Lee’s watercolour illustrations of the late 1970s* and beyond; so much so that it wouldn’t surprise me if Lee’s work was also, as much as Jeffrey Jones’s, an influence on the “look” of “Small Gifts” and, especially, “Pursuit.”
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* The first edition of Faeries by Lee, Froud, et al., appeared in 1978.