Geoff Hunt, Master Painter and O'Brian Cover Artist

This week's cover artist is Geoff Hunt, the master painter behind Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin nautical series. Take a look at the following two covers for a good example of how much impact a cover can make. The image on the left is from the first edition of Master and Commander, and the second image is Geoff Hunt's painting for the same book: To me there is no comparison. I'm no art critic, but I know what I like. And I love Geoff Hunt's covers. Hunt painted the covers of all twenty-one books in the series, and I think they capture the flavor of the books perfectly. I was in a bookstore one day when I stumbled across a stack of Geoff Hunt calendars. I immediately snatched up two of them; one I kept in its cellophane wrapper, the other I cut up and put into picture frames. If you've watched any of my video book reviews you may have caught a glimpse of them on the wall behind me. Here are a couple of pictures of the framed calendar images: Someday I hope to afford actual prints, but for now these framed calendar pages do just fine. If you're interested in learning more about Hunt's work, the following links may be helpful: Many of his paintings are collected in The Marine Art of Geoff Hunt. There is also a dvd of his life and works called Geoff Hunt: Portrait of a Marine Artist Geoff Hunt prints at Amazon.com