English artist Patrick Woodroffe began his career as a fantasy and science fiction illustrator, as well as contributing to a number of album covers. He eventually developed into a wonderfully idiosyncratic gallery artist, taking influences from medieval art, Bosch, Bruegel, Van Eyck and others.
Patrick Woodroffe died last Saturday, May 10, 2014 at the age of 74.
Largely self-taught, Woodroffe experimented with unorthodox techniques, varied his approach and explored different styles. His work could be extraordinarily detailed, loaded with meaningful details.
His official website has a fair bit of information, and two main gallery sections, here and here (as well as other parts of the site if you poke around), but the images are unfortunately small.
Some of the previous unofficial sources for larger images of his work are no longer online. There is a reasonably extensive unofficial gallery on Fantasy Art (RU). I’ve listed what other resources I could pull together below.
There is a recent book, Benign Icons, and an older collection, Mythopoeikon that is out of print, but available used. There are other titles as well, including a number of books for which he did the cover art.
For more, see my previous posts on Patrick Woodroffe, and here.
[Via Spectrum Fantastic]










Tumblr, tagged Woodroffe
Fantasy Art (RU)
Secret Lexicon
Just ART-e
Squirrel Basket
Bio on Wikipedia
My previous posts:
Patrick Woodroffe
Patrick Woodroffe (update)
Sad to hear that he died, he was a highly creative and very inspiring artist. “The Second Earth” was a great book. He added a lot of imagination to the world.
A major influence for me early on. He and Roger Dean helped start me on my way.
Thanks for the comment, Andrew. Yes, I think it’s unfortunate that he didn’t have wider exposure to a contemporary audience.
Thanks, Bill. (Teenager in the sixties?, said takes-one-to-know-one…)
Oh no, another of my favourite artists from my youth, gone, together recently with H.R.Giger !!!
I avidly collected ANY books and material of Patrick`s, and will once again pull the beautiful illustrated books of his from my library shelves for one more look.
A BIG loss, so very sad.
He lives on through his art. Loved.